Agent-based outpatient scheduling for diagnostic services

This paper presents an agent-based distributed scheduling approach for diagnostic services in a hospital setting. In particular, we focus on how to effectively allocate the last-minute available diagnostic timeslots and how to deal with dynamic changes in existing outpatient schedules. We propose an agent-based dynamic scheduling system which allocates available diagnostic services timeslots to outpatients through an iterative bidding procedure. We also evaluate and analyze the possibility of implementing the proposed system in large scale outpatient scheduling environments. Our experiments show that the system performs well at a scale of managing a thousand standby waiting patients.