Simulating patient flow through an Emergency Department using process-driven discrete event simulation

Abstract

This paper suggests an architecture for supporting discrete event simulations that is based upon using executable process definitions and separate components for specifying resources. The paper describes the architecture and indicates how it might be used to suggest efficiency improvements for hospital Emergency Departments (EDs). Preliminary results suggest that the proposed architecture provides considerable ease of use and flexibility for specifying a wider range of simulation problems, thus creating the possibility of carrying out a wide range of comparisons of different approaches to ED improvement. Some early comparisons suggest that the simulations are likely to be of value to the medical community and that the simulation architecture offers useful flexibility.