Abstract
Making emergency evacuation plans for disaster prevention is always a high priority for hospital administrators to ensure the safety of patients and employees. This study employs the outpatient chemotherapy area of a cancer medical center as an example, and its area involves professional medical care and relatively complex human group behaviors. Hence, it is necessary to simulate evacuations in advance to formulate a special evacuation plan. To achieve this task, a constraint-based simulation system is developed with three major processes: defining spatial and activity constraints, agent-based modeling, and optimizing resource allocation. The spatial boundaries are converted from a three-dimensional model in the Building Information Modeling (BIM) to conduct a visualized simulation. Based on the spatial boundaries, the activities of the agents are set to obey the process specified by work studies. Finally, the Monte Carlo method is employed to simulate the stochastic rescue behaviors of nurses during disasters to determine the fittest resource allocation with the shortest evacuation time for different numbers of patients. The results reveal that the proposed system can output a suggested list of resource allocations and visualized results for administrators when making evacuation plans such that all the people in the area can be safely evacuated.
Highlights
A hospital is a highly sensitive environment because the behavioral complexity and disaster seriousness of hospitals are not characteristic of those in a general building
It is important for hospital administrators to make and drill emergency evacuation plans for disaster prevention
Each evacuation process or step is limited by the disaster environment and available resources, so evacuation must be simulated under these constraints to find an approximate best solution that can be performed. To achieve this task for an outpatient chemotherapy area with consideration of the five items mentioned above, this study proposes a constraint-based simulation [17,18,19,20] system with the capability for visual representation
Summary
A hospital is a highly sensitive environment because the behavioral complexity and disaster seriousness of hospitals are not characteristic of those in a general building. Sudden disasters always threaten patients’ lives because some patients are unable to move without assistance. It is important for hospital administrators to make and drill emergency evacuation plans for disaster prevention. This task is considered time-consuming and labor-intensive. Evacuation planners must consider controlling restrictions related to toxicity and the movement limitations of patients undergoing treatment in the chemotherapy area. Hospital administrators must develop more specific evacuation plans for outpatient chemotherapy areas as compared to those for other areas of the hospital
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