Developing Smart Emergency Applications with Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems have been importantly contributing to the development of the theory and the practice of complex distributed systems and, in particular, they have shown their potential to meet critical needs in high-speed, mission-critical, content-rich, distributed information applications where mutual interdependencies, dynamic environments, uncertainty, and sophisticated control play a remarkable role. Therefore, multi-agent systems are considered a suitable technology for the realization of e-health applications where (i) the use of loosely coupled and heterogeneous components, (ii) the dynamic and distributed management of data and (iii) the remote collaboration among users are often the most relevant requirements. This paper describes some of the main reasons why multi-agent systems are today considered one of the best technologies for the realization and deployment of advances e-health applications and, in particular, of smart emergency applications. After an introduction on the inherent characteristics of the use of multi-agent systems for e-health, the paper presents the results of EU-scale project CASCOM: a real multi-agent system for the execution of smart emergency tasks.