Pii: S0933-3657(03)00010-1

8 9 Abstract 10 11 The control of the right application of medical protocols is a key issue in hospital environments. 12 For the automated monitoring of medical protocols, we need a domain-independent language for 13 their representation and a fully, or semi, autonomous system that understands the protocols and 14 supervises their application. In this paper we describe a specification language and a multi-agent 15 system architecture for monitoring medical protocols. We model medical services in hospital 16 environments as specialized domain agents and interpret a medical protocol as a negotiation process 17 between agents. A medical service can be involved in multiple medical protocols, and so specialized 18 domain agents are independent of negotiation processes and autonomous system agents perform 19 monitoring tasks. We present the detailed architecture of the system agents and of an important 20 domain agent, the database broker agent, that is responsible of obtaining relevant information about 21 the clinical history of patients. We also describe how we tackle the problems of privacy, integrity and 22 authentication during the process of exchanging information between agents. 23 # 2003 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. 24 25