Modeling a Hospital Emergency Department Using a Closed Queueing Network

摘要

Simulation studies for the hospital emergency department (ED) have been carried out by many academic researchers and practitioners. However, simulation models are often time-consuming to develop and run, and are not easy to integrate into web-based decision support systems. We model the hospital emergency department as a closed queuing network due to the fact that its number of work-in-process (patients) is limited by the number of beds within the emergency department. We use mean value analysis to evaluate the performance of an emergency department with general patient inter-arrival and service time distributions. Numerical results obtained from this model are compared with data from the University of Louisville (UofL) hospital emergency department and show good accuracy.