An opponent model for agent-based shared decision-making via a genetic algorithm

INTRODUCTION: Shared decision-making (SDM) has received a great deal of attention as an effective way to achieve patient-centered medical care. SDM aims to bring doctors and patients together to develop treatment plans through negotiation. However, time pressure and subjective factors such as medical illiteracy and inadequate communication skills prevent doctors and patients from accurately expressing and obtaining their opponent's preferences. This problem leads to SDM being in an incomplete information environment, which significantly reduces the efficiency of the negotiation and even leads to failure. METHODS: In this study, we integrated a negotiation strategy that predicts opponent preference using a genetic algorithm with an SDM auto-negotiation model constructed based on fuzzy constraints, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of SDM by addressing the problems posed by incomplete information environments and rapidly generating treatment plans with high mutual satisfaction. RESULTS: A variety of negotiation scenarios are simulated in experiments and the proposed model is compared with other excellent negotiation models. The results indicated that the proposed model better adapts to multivariate scenarios and maintains higher mutual satisfaction. DISCUSSION: The agent negotiation framework supports SDM participants in accessing treatment plans that fit individual preferences, thereby increasing treatment satisfaction. Adding GA opponent preference prediction to the SDM negotiation framework can effectively improve negotiation performance in incomplete information environments.