JoWUA

Abstract

In a smart hospital environment, an effective allocation of diverse hospital resources (devices, nurses, beds, etc.) is a key issue, and it is becoming much more complex due to the rise of service demand from patients, the heterogeneity of hospital medical resources, and the extensive application of wireless healthcare technology. Moreover, the traditional methods have limitations in scalability, late decision-making, and a lack of consideration for wireless communication environments. In order to overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a Hierarchical Multi-Agent Swarm Algorithm (HMSA) for optimized hospital resource allocation over a wireless network. In the proposed scheme, a hierarchical multi-agent mechanism combined with a swarm intelligence algorithm is applied to distributed, adaptive, communication-aware hospital resource allocation. The multi-agent architecture comprises 4 layers, which are the healthcare device, local agent, regional coordination, and global optimization layers. These agents cooperatively observe the status of available hospital resources and healthcare services requirements. Also, a wireless-aware fitness function is designed to jointly optimize the system utilization, allocation delay, throughput, PDR, and QoS of the services. A simulation has been carried out using a large-scale smart hospital environment. Comparison results demonstrate that HMSA outperforms FCFS, Round Robin, Ant Colony Optimization, and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms. The HMSA achieved utilization of 94.8%, throughput of 95.4 Mbps, PDR of 98.7%, QoS of 97.1%, and allocation delay of 96 ms. With one-way ANOVA analysis, an F-value of 32.84 was produced, and p < 0.001 showed that significant improvements were achieved.