Group decision and negotiation support in telemedicine: an application of intelligent mobile agents as non-human teleworkers

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 and cost effective enterprise. This paper proposes an Internet-based framework for supporting collaborative work among human and non-human teleworkers. The proposed framework enables the geographically dispersed organization to distribute work across the Internet and embed intelligent software agents, as teleworkers, capable of supporting decision and negotiation to facilitate implementation of complex distributed decision making. The proposed framework is being simulated on a telemedicine project