Planning Autonomous Material Transportation in Hospitals

Abstract

Until recently, architects planned the layout for a new hospital based only on design aspects, experience, and legal regulations. Today, hospital logistics planners are included at an earlier stage in the project and support hospital layout planning with important logistics aspects. While methods supporting patient flow are prioritized in the layout planning, methods focusing on material flow are lacking. Therefore, this study is part of a project that aims to develop a decision support model for hospital layout planning that includes material flow. We develop a semi-open queuing network model of a hospital with multiple floors and compare it with agent-based simulation modeling. Simulation results show that a semi-open queuing network is a promising approach to support hospital planners in the decision-making process of hospital layout planning that includes planning material flow performed by autonomous mobile robots.