An Application of Queuing Theory On Relief Systems

Natural disasters and complex disasters produce significant numbers of casualties that overload a region’s medical infrastructure. Field hospitals (FHs) help cope with this high influx of casualties. Often, they struggle with high patient arrival rates and limited personnel. This imbalance is representable as a queueing problem. By representing a field hospital as a queueing model, tracing the different patient’s paths through it, and finding the patients’ sojourn time distributions, an estimation of the necessary personnel is possible. The research question of this work is: “How can the sojourn time distribution of patients’ paths through a field hospital (FH) be modelled through Queueing Theory and analyzed to make predictions on the number of personnel required to run a field hospital?”

Contestants

Barry Philip Owiti