A Canonical Agent Model for Healthcare Applications

Although the utility of autonomous agents and multiagent systems in healthcare applications is now well established, agent technologies themselves remain somewhat immature and, from a theoretical point of view, often ad hoc. We've developed a standard, or canonical, agent model that's intended to be both theoretically well motivated and technically well defined while permitting alternative instantiations. A general autonomous agent system architecture has emerged from the healthcare application domain. Twelve invariant input-output patterns, or signatures, summarize its component properties, and shared data structures define the component interactions