Capturing and Specifying Multiagent Systems for the Management of Community Healthcare

Community Care in the UK relates to the provision of effective support in response to both predicted and unpredicted personal needs. Extensive co-operation between independent care agencies is fundamental to the effective operation of care delivery services, each of which needs to meet its own goals. Typically this results in the unnecessary use of resources as the current systems cannot share relevant information without compromising the security of all the information held. The use of semantics for inter-agent communication enables more effective interoperability between collaborative intelligent agents. Contractual agreements to support the negotiations with community healthcare agencies creates a complex economic environment that must be described in a robust way if agent managed services are to be accepted commercially. This chapter considers the 'Event Accounting' model in relation to the myriad payment transactions within the community care environment, and demonstrates the use of Transaction Agent Modelling (TrAM), a robust transaction-based framework for the requirements capture of agent managed community healthcare systems.