Author:

Keywords:

itec, iMinds, Science & Technology, Technology, Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications, Operations Research & Management Science, Computer Science, Multi-Agent simulation, health care communication systems, emulation

Abstract:

The aim of the NuCiA project is to build a simulation and test environment in which future nurse call systems can be developed and tested. The need for a flexible, virtual test system can easily be explained. Hospitals and care institutions are getting bigger while there is a tendency for managing them as a single unit. It is becoming much harder to implement realistic test setups in hardware. The number of simultaneous actions on a variety of devices, the complex user scenario's and the integration of the system with others, makes the problem of testing very challenging. Moreover, a fast evolution of electronics not only imposes shorter times to market, more powerful and intelligent reasoning within the devices itself provokes a big impact on the distributed intelligence and architectural design decisions of the nurse call system. In the NuCiA project (Nurse Call simulation In Agent environments) we study agent based simulation (ABS) to cope with the current challenges of developing and testing future nurse call systems. One of the challenges ahead will be to apply typical ABS modeling and link it with hardware components and devices to realistically test the operation of virtual end-users in a combined real and virtual test-system.