Emergency Department Divert Avoidance Using Petri Nets

Emergency department overcrowding has become a major issue over the past decade. This research investigates emergency department overcrowding resulting ambulance divert. Patient flow models of the emergency department were developed using Petri Nets. The objective of these models is two-fold, to analyze patient flow in the emergency department and to assist in determining the minimum sequence of events leading a hospital from desirable operating state to divert states. A two-phase mixed-integer programming formulation was used to generate the set of minimum sequence of events. This is an on-going research, and the results of this paper shall be used to develop control policies for hospital divert avoidance.