Integrating Simulation with Optimization in Emergency Department Management

Nowadays, the hospital Emergency Department (ED) provides new challenges to their decision-makers because of high demands for services, high costs, and limited budget leading to inadequate healthcare resources. In this chapter, we integrated the simulation and optimization technique to address this important management problem in the ED, and we set up a decision support system to help the ED managers to design the optimal healthcare resources’ staffing and scheduling plan in the specific environment. In an ED system model, many different categories of patients may require multiple services through a common sequence. Therefore, each service center has its own costs. The configuration of the resources will affect the overall efficiency of the system directly. So, our main work here is to set up a decision support system for the ED managers to design the optimal configuration of resources with the objective minimize patients LOS and minimize the overall costs separately.