Modeling a Hospital Queueing Network

Abstract

Healthcare systems differ intrinsically from manufacturing systems. As such, they require a distinct modeling approach. In this article, we show how to construct a queueing network of a general class of healthcare systems. In order to analyze such networks, we use the parametric decomposition approach. Using this approach the network is decomposed into a set of single queueing systems which can be aggregated and general performance measures of the queueing network are obtained. In addition, we develop new expressions to assess the impact of service outages and use the queueing network to approximate patient flow times and to evaluate a number of practical applications.