An effective potential field model to solve hospital resource management crisis

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new application of potential field concept that is used for resource management in distributed environments. More precisely, we propose an efficient algorithm to assist the medial staff in a hospital to deal with a crisis caused by receiving a large number of patients simultaneously. Our algorithm runs by all member of the medical team in parallel and guides every team member in his/her choice of which patient to rescue at every moment. Our extensive simulation results show that our algorithm achieves very efficient results. In some scenarios, the percentage of saved patients exceeds 82%. In addition, our results show a fair distribution of the load over the different nurses.