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The use of a medical guideline can be seen as the execution of computational tasks, sequentially or in parallel, in the face of patient data. It has been shown that many of such guidelines can be represented as a 'network of tasks', i.e., as a number of steps that have a specific function or goal. To investigate the quality of such guidelines we propose a formalization of criteria for good practice medicine a guideline should comply to. We use this theory in conjunction with medical background knowledge to verify the quality of a guideline dealing with diabetes mellitus type 2 using the interactive theorem prover KIV. Verification using task execution and background knowledge is a novel approach to quality checking of medical guidelines.

Formal methods have been used in the past for the verification of the correctness of formalised versions of medical guidelines. In this paper a second possible application of the use of formal methods is proposed: checking whether a guideline conforms to global medical quality requirements. It is argued that this allows spotting design errors in medical guidelines, which is seen as a useful application for formal methods in medicine. However, this type of verification may require medical knowledge currently not available within the guidelines, i.e. medical background knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method for checking the quality of a treatment for a disorder, based on the theory of abductive diagnosis. We also examine the medical background knowledge required to be able to quality check a guideline. The method is illustrated by the formal analysis of an actual guideline for the management of diabetes mellitus type 2.

An agent aims to secure his projected needs by attempting to build a set of (business) relationships with other agents. A relationship is built by exchanging private information, and is characterised by its intimacy — degree of closeness — and balance — degree of fairness. Each argumentative interaction between two agents then has two goals: to satisfy some immediate need, and to do so in a way that develops the relationship in a desired direction. An agent’s desire to develop each relationship in a particular way then places constraints on the argumentative utterances. The form of negotiation described is argumentative interaction constrained by a desire to develop such relationships.

The Distributed Rule Induction (DRI) project at the University of Portsmouth is concerned with distributed data mining algorithms for automatically generating rules of all kinds. In this paper we present a system architecture and its implementation for inducing modular classification rules in parallel in a local area network using a distributed blackboard system. We present initial results of a prototype implementation based on the Prism algorithm.

This work describes a system that allocates end-to-end bandwidth, in a switched meshed communications network. The solution makes use of market-based software agents that compete in a number of decentralised marketplaces to buy and sell bandwidth resources. Agents perform a distributed depth first search with decentralised markets in order to allocate routes for calls. The approach relies on a resource reservation and commit mechanism in the network. Initial results show that under a light network load, the system sets up a high percentage of calls which is comparable to the optimum value and that, under all network loads, it performs significantly better than a random strategy.

The work described in this paper deals with the definition of an empirical model to classify components, and the development of a knowledge-based system to capture and organize the knowledge of the experts, as well as, technical documentation associated with components. The objective is to provide developers with a comprehensive tool that addresses the problem of managing (i.e. selecting, configuring, integrating and deploying) COTS components to deliver tailored software systems. The goal of the system is to support the decision process of business managers, software consultants and architects in the definition and design of services for a variety of specific application domains, mainly in the area of Electronic Business. The system should also support the engineers in the specification of software architectures that realize those services.