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Abstract. Scheduling patients in a hospital is a challenging issue as it calls for a sustainable architecture and an effective scheduling scheme that can dynamically schedule the available resources. The objectives of this paper are to propose a viable and systematic approach to develop a distributed cooperative problem solver for scheduling patients based on MAS to minimize the patient stay in a hospital. Our solution approach combines contract net protocol (CNP), multi-agent system architecture, process specification model based on time Petri net (TPN) and optimization theories. Our system first automatically formulate patient scheduling problem based on the TPN models. The patient scheduling problem is decomposed into a number of subproblems that are solved by cooperative agents. A collaborative algorithm is invoked by individual agents to optimize the schedules locally based on a problem formulation automatically obtained by the Petri net models. To realize our solution methodology, we proposed a scheme for publication and discovery of agents' services based on FIPA compliant multi-agent system platform. We develop a scheduling system to solve the dynamic patient scheduling problem.