Multi Agent system for information server integrity maintainance

Abstract

Decision making about the health workforce in Kenya is very crucial as far as efficient delivery of health services is concerned. Today, more than 60% of the health workforce is located in Nairobi, leaving the rest of the country with insufficient health personnel thus lowering the quality of health services provided in those areas especially in the North Eastern part of Kenya.

Currently, this very crucial information is being held by the various regulatory bodies which manage the specific cadres; i.e. the Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board, the Nursing Council of Kenya, The Clinical Officers Council among others. Current practices are that whenever the health managers need information to assist them in decision making, they have to send someone to the respective regulatory boards to get the information using a storage device. This has proven to be inefficient since moving from the Ministries of Health to the regulatory bodies is prone to many issues.

Due to the inefficiencies involved with the current practices of getting the data, this research has identified that there is need to make this data more readily available to the Health managers to support them in their decision making using better practices.

In this research, we set out to ensure that data is always available to health managers to support them in decision making using multi-agent systems. We used the GAIA methodology for multi-agent systems for analysis and design of the system. We also used an open source Java toolkit, JADE framework for building multiple agents. The multiple agents are responsible for ensuring that the information available to the health managers is

always up to date by transporting the most current data from the regulatory bodies to the ministries of health.

Use of the multi agent based system proved to be a better way of transporting the data compared to current practices in terms of speed, security and confidentiality.