A Conversational Agent to Support Hospital Bed Allocation

• Débora C. Engelmann PUCRS / University of Genoa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6090-8294
• Lucca Dornelles Cezar PUCRS https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6312-1529
• Alison R. Panisson UFSC https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9438-5508
• Rafael H. Bordini PUCRS https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8688-9901

Resumo

Bed allocation in hospitals is a critical and important problem, and it has become even more important since last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present an approach based on intelligent-agent technologies to assist hospital staff in charge of bed allocation. As part of this work, we developed a web-based simulation of hospital bed allocation system integrated with a chatbot for interaction with the user. As a core component in our approach, an intelligent agent uses the feedback of a plan validator to check if there are any flaws in a user-made allocation, communicating any detected problems to the user using natural language through the chatbot. Thus, our resulting application not only validates bed allocation plans but also interacts with hospital professionals using natural language communication, including giving explainable suggestions of better alternative allocations. We evaluated our approach with professionals responsible for bed allocation in two local hospitals and a doctor who provides consultancy to another local hospital. The version of the system reported in this paper addresses all the suggestions made by the specialists who evaluated its previous version.

Palavras-chave: Hospital bed allocation, Intelligent agent, PDDL plan validation, Linear programming, Chatbot