As the organiser of the workshop 'IT-stöd för vård och omsorg i hemmet', the author presents a general picture of the subject, and call for one day's discussion with around 30 participants from all around Sweden.

This report shows the result of the work of IANIS+ eHealth work group (WG). The WG has collected regional eHealth experiences from around Europe through a number of activities: • Regional eHealth case studies of which 17 (from 15 regions) are shown in this report • Four joint meetings of the group of which one was a policy seminar with invited guests from the EU Commission, relevant organisations in the field of eHealth and regional authorities • A meeting with the European Commission DG Information Society & Media, Unit H1 eHealth • Collaboration with the eHealth network within the organisation Assembly of European Regions (AER) • Attendance in recent major eHealth conferences: · Personal Health Systems arranged by the European Commission when launching the eHealth part of the 7th Framework Programme, 11-12 February 2007 · The EU-US eHealth Policy Workshop, 10 May 2007 · The final conference of the INTERREG IIIB project Baltic eHealth, 21-22 May 2007 • eHealth seminars at IANIS+ annual conferences in Blekinge 2006 and Bilbao 2007 The innovation perspective of eHealth in the regions has been the focus for the IANIS+ eHealth WG. Regional diversity regarding strategies, policies, and action plans for eHealth can act as a driving factor for successful eHealth projects, but leads also to challenges for interoperability, standardisation, integrity and security. It is important to learn from others. It may be about how to choose the right technology or what methods to use for implementation. Depending on what area of eHealth, there are numerous projects and up-and-running services from which we can learn. Not to forget there are also many experiences from unsuccessful trials. Even if an eHealth solution has failed in one setting, it can be a success under different circumstances. The aim of the IANIS+ eHealth Working Group was to share experience between regions belonging to the network, and bring up some issues of good practice for regional eHealth implementation. Projects brought up in the IANIS+ working group are projects in there own rights, with pros and cons. The projects cover different perspectives and types of eHealth. Some were difficult to evaluate while others are valuable comparable experiences from different settings and circumstances. In any case, we can learn something from all the cases as examples from reality and as a complement to formal evaluations and scientific studies of eHealth. We would rather use the term good practice than best practice. There is always something good to learn from others while there is hardly any best practice that works under every circumstance.

The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate potential synergies between an electronic waybill (e-Waybill) and other Intelligent Transport System (ITS) services. An e-Waybill service, as presented in this thesis, should be able to perform the functions of a paper waybill (which is an important transport document and contains essential information about a consignment) and it should contain at least the information specified in a paper waybill. To investigate synergies between the e-Waybill solutions and ITS services, we present 5 conceptual e-Waybill solutions that differ in where the e-Waybill information is stored, read, and written. These solutions are further investigated for functional and technical requirements (non-functional requirements), which can potentially impose constraints on a potential system that should implement the e-Waybill service. A set of 20 ITS services are considered for synergy analysis in this thesis. These services are mainly for road transport, however most of them are relevant to be considered for utilization in other modes of transport as well. For information synergy analysis, the e-Waybill solutions are assessed based on their synergies with ITS services. For different ITS services, the required input information entities are identified; and if at least one information entity can be provided by an e-Waybill at the right location we regard it to be a synergy. The result from our synergy analysis may support the choice of practical e-Waybill systems, which has the possibility to provide high synergy with ITS services. This may lead to a higher utilization of ITS services and more sustainable transport, e.g., in terms of reduced congestion and emissions. Additionally, a service design method has been proposed for supporting the process of designing new ITS services, which primarily utilizes on functional synergies with already existing ITS services. In order to illustrate the usage of the suggested method, we have applied it for designing a new ITS service, i.e., the Liability Intelligent Transport System (LITS) service. The purpose of the LITS service is to support the process of identifying when, where, and by whom a consignment has been damaged and who was responsible when the consignment was damaged.

Representing the complexity of a complex world is neither possible, nor helpful for practical judgment or decision-making. Human decision makers are hampered by cognitive limitations and, often also, time pressures and open-ended decision processes. Computer tool for simplifying understanding can help overcome some of these problems. I will here show that heuristic tools, enabling various conceptualizations can be of help in representing a complex world in a manner simple enough for professional inquiry and decision making to be feasible.

This thesis describes an investigation into the use of multi-agent systems for automatic distributed control of district heating systems. A district heating system is basically composed of production units, a distribution network, and a large number of consumer substations. Operators of district heating systems have several, often conflicting, goals, e.g., to satisfy customers and to minimize production costs. Current substations are purely reactive devices, making local decisions without taking into account the global state. Moreover the substations determine the flows in all parts of the district heating system. The optimal operation of the district heating system is therefore limited to providing sufficiently high temperature and pressure to all customers. The approach studied in this thesis is to equip substations with software agents to form a multi-agent system. The purpose is to dynamically control the district heating system using demand-side-management strategies. Demand-side-management are claimed to have a number of positive effects, e.g., lower production costs, reduced usage of fossil fuel, dimensioning production capacity for a lower effect/reserve alternatively with maintained dimensioning increase the number of consumers. To our knowledge this is the first work that implements automated demand-side-management strategies in district heating systems. The fundamental idea behind the approach is that a large number of local decisions with apparently small impact, together have large impact on the overall system performance without reducing the quality of service delivered. In order to evaluate the approach, a fine-grained simulation tool that simulates a complete district heating system was built. This work included the development of novel simulation models, often by integrating existing ones. The simulation tool simulates a district heating system second by second and dynamically supports interaction at each time step with the multi-agent system. The tool enables detailed performance analysis of both district heating systems as well as of different strategies of the control system. Results from simulation studies indicate that the approach makes it possible to reduce production while maintaining the quality of service. The study also shows that it is possible to control the trade-off between quality of service and degree of surplus production as well as the possibility of extending the system with new consumers without increasing production capacity. In another study, a experiment in a controlled physical environment, two agent-based approaches are evaluated and compared to existing technologies. The experiment shows that it is possible to automatically load balance a small district heating network using agent technology. This thesis also comprises an initial study where the strengths and weaknesses of agent-based approaches and mathematical optimization techniques are analyzed and compared. Finally, a generalized formal characterization of the problem space under investigation is provided, i.e., production and logistics network management, together with a preliminary evaluation of the applicability of the suggested multi-agent system approach for this general problem area.