ABMS optimization for emergency departments

This article presents an agent-based modeling and simulation to design a decision support system for healthcare emergency department (ED) to aid in setting up management guidelines to improve it. This ongoing research is being performed by the Research Group in Individual Oriented Modeling at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona with close collaboration of the hospital staff team of Sabadell. The objective of the proposed procedure is to optimize the performance of such complex and dynamic healthcare EDs, which are overcrowded. Exhaustive search optimization is used to find the optimal ED staff configuration, which includes doctors, triage nurses, and admission personnel, i.e., a multi-dimensional and multi-objective problem. An index is proposed to minimize patient stay time in the ED. The model is implemented using NetLogo. The results obtained by using alternatives Monte Carlo and Pipeline schemes are promising. The impact of these schemes to reduce the computational resources used is described.