Information Flow Analysis in Autonomous Agent and Peer-to-Peer Systems for Self-organizing Electronic Health Records

There are various software applications that are highly suited for development using agent technology. Typically these applications take advantage of some of the intrinsic qualities of agents that include: autonomy, reactivity/proactivity, group-action, and/or mobility. On the other hand, there are many parallels between Agent Systems and Peer-to-Peer Systems allowing the latter to be employed in similar problem domains. This paper presents an agent application in the health care record management domain and then examines how such a system might also be implemented as a Peer-to-Peer System. The management of health care records is in itself a novel use of Mobile Agent technology and in order to understand the Agent System Dynamics, the system is simulated using a limited number of agents and agent platforms; as well as being modeled mathematically. The Peer-to-Peer system is also simulated and modeled mathematically demonstrating a number of behaviors that are similar across both systems.