A Novel Architecture for a Medical Diagnostic System Based on MAS Technology and Swarm Intelligence

Prof. Dr. Rainer Unland

ICB, University of Duisburg-Essen

Fri Apr 08 15:10:00 NZST 2005 in Room 031, MSCS

Abstract

In this talk I will present a medical diagnostic system that combines the advantages of the holonic paradigm, multi-agent system technologies, and swarm intelligence in order to realize a highly reliable, adaptive, scalable, flexible, and robust Internet-based medical diagnostic system. The system sets up on an alliance of medical experts - realized by agents - that collaborate in an ant-like manner in order to provide a viable medical diagnosis. In contrast to most other holonic systems that reveal either a hierarchical or a federated architecture the proposed approach assumes a flat set of autonomous agents that only organize temporarily during the solution process of a diagnosis request in a hierarchical structure (but not hierarchical control flow). Each agent has a certain responsibility. Some agents may represent experts on a broader field of diseases while others may be experts on (occurrences of) one specific disease. Like ants in an ant colony the proposed agents exhibit a comparatively simple architecture built on reactive behavior. The real power of the system stems from the fact that a large number of those simple agents collaborate in order to come to a reliable diagnosis.

Short Biography

Rainer Unland is a full professor in computer science at the Institute for Computer Science and Business Information Systems (ICB) at University of Duisburg-Essen where he heads the chair Data Management Systems and Knowledge Representation. He has authored, co-authored and edited numerous publications, journals and (text)books in the areas of non-standard/object-oriented database management systems, XML and database systems, object-oriented software development, component-based and aspect-oriented software engineering, advanced transaction management, computer supported cooperative work, (distributed) artificial intelligence, especially Multi-Agent Systems, and industrials informatics. Moreover, he has served as Chair and/or PC member for more than 80 national and international conferences, workshops and symposia. He is co-founder of the annual international conference Netobjectdays that, as a highly successful applied conference, serves as kind of umbrella for topics related to software engineering technologies, multi-agent system technologies, Grid computing, and Web-Services and the Internet, and of the International German Conference on Multi-Agent Systems Technology (MATES). He is also co-editor-in-chief of the IOS journal "Multiagent and Grid Systems – an International Journal".