Simulation-based optimisation: analysis of the emergency department resources under COVID-19 conditions

Abstract

The emergency department (ED) is the most important section in every hospital. The ED behaviour is adequately complex, because the ED has several uncertain parameters such as the waiting time of patients or arrival time of patients. To deal with ED complexities, this paper presents a simulation-based optimisation-based meta-model (S-BO-BM-M) to minimise total waiting time of the arriving patients in an emergency department under COVID-19 conditions. A full-factorial design used meta-modelling approach to identify scenarios of systems to estimate an integer nonlinear programming model for the patient waiting time minimisation under COVID-19 conditions. Findings showed that the S-BO-BM-M obtains the new key resources configuration. Simulation-based optimisation meta-modelling approach in this paper is an invaluable contribution to the ED and medical managers for the redesign and evaluates of current situation ED system to reduce waiting time of patients and improve resource distribution in the ED under COVID-19 conditions to improve efficiency.