Modelling the Social Practices of an Emergency Room to Ensure Staff and Patient Wellbeing

Understanding the impact of activities is important for emergency rooms (ER) to ensure patient wellbeing and staff satisfaction. An ER is a complex social multi-agent system where staff members should understand the needs of patients, what their colleagues expect of them and how the treatment usually goes about.

Decision support tools can contribute to this understanding as they can better manage complex systems and give insight into possible problems using formal methods. Social practices aim to capture this social dimension by focussing on the shared routines in a system, such as diagnosing or treating the patient.

This paper uses the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to formalize social practices and then applies it to the ER domain. This results in an ontology that can be used as a basis for decision support tools based on formal reasoning, which we demonstrate by verifying a number of properties for our use case.

These results also serve as an example for formalizing the social dimension of multi-agent systems in other domains.