Adaptive Fault Tolerant Hospital Resource Scheduling Umesh Deshpande, Arobinda Gupta, and Anupam Basu   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Quality Issues Abstract In a distributed hospital system, different hospitals should collaborate among themselves for sharing their resources to provide better and faster service to the patients. We address the distributed hospital resource scheduling problem and apply the Generalized Partial Global Planning (GPGP) approach used for multiagent systems for the same. An adaptive coordination mechanism based on the contract net protocol is proposed to support inter-hospital collaboration. We have performed simulation studies and the experimental results show that our coordination mechanism performs better than commonly used schemes. Fault handling mechanisms are presented so that the system continues to provide service even in the presence of faults. The proposed approach is applicable in contexts other than the distributed hospital system as well. DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery