DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION SCENARIO TESTING OF SCHEMATIC LAYOUTS IN AN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT EXPANSION PROJECT

Emergency department (ED) expansion and redesign is a complex design task which must take into account many operational processes (current and proposed) as well a projected changes in the system, e.g., patient volume. Discrete event simulation (DES) is a tool to aid the decision making process by simulating these processes; however, it's typically used in the operations or early design stages before many decisions are made about layout, capacity, and new processes. Later in the design process, the use of simulation can provide an avenue for what-if scenario testing of layout and programmatic changes. This presentation presents an initial discrete event simulation analysis of various layout options during the schematic design stage of an ED expansion project and provides a brief overview of future research directions evaluating decision making using discrete event simulation and visualization simulation.