System reliability evaluation for an emergency department service system

Abstract

An emergency department service system provides a medical service to patients who are prioritized for medical care, starting with triage categories and ending with the discharge formalities. In this paper, the emergency department service system is modeled as a fuzzy multi-state network called emergency department service network (EDSN). Each arc is a workstation with a fuzzy multi-state situation because of the vagueness in measuring human capability, and each node is represented as a waiting area. The main aim of this paper is to evaluate the system reliability, that is, the possibility that an emergency department service system can provide necessary treatments to the patients. Since each workstation is fuzzy multi-state, we proposed a method to generate the membership function by utilizing by statistical parameters, such as average and standard deviation. A practical example with statistical data taken from a Taiwan hospital to evaluate the system reliability is demon-strated.