Building agent-based corporate information systems: An application to telemedicine

Rapid advances of the Internet, multimedia technology and virtual reality have opened new opportunities for organizations to re-design their traditional functional units often separated by vast distances into a virtually cohesive enterprise capable of responding quickly to market changes. This paper proposes an agent-based framework for supporting collaborative work among human and non-human teleworkers, namely, software agents. The proposed framework enables the geographically dispersed organization to distribute work across the Internet and embed intelligent software agents capable of supporting decision to facilitate implementation of complex and distributed decision making. The development of agent-based corporate information systems is a process of putting together a coordinated workflow of collaborating agents. The proposed framework is currently being simulated on a telemedicine project.