Cost-Aware Dynamic Task Sharing Among Decentralized Autonomous Agents: Towards Dynamic Patient Sharing Among Hospitals

ABSTRACT

In the COVID-19 pandemic era, hospitals tend to be crowded with patients. Dynamic task sharing is becoming an important research theme and can be applied to patient sharing among hospitals. Unlike in standard task scheduling, the tasks are created dynamically and asynchronously, and each agent (hospital or region) is independent. Hence, we previously designed and compared the decentralized algorithms for dynamic task sharing. However, in these algorithms, the cost of task transfers was not considered. The cost of transferring a patient to a distant hospital is high and cannot be ignored. In this paper, we present new decentralized algorithms for dynamic task sharing that consider the cost of task transfers. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.