Queueing Models and Optimization for Healthcare System Design and Improvement

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Simulation has been the dominant tool for healthcare operations management for the last two decades. Despite its ability to model complex stochastic systems by incorporating all the details into a single model, simulation models are mainly useful for validation and actual implementation. Queueing models are good for developing valuable insights into operational decision making in situations with inherent uncertainty, and have been increasingly used to address complex problems in areas such as telecommunications, flexible manufacturing, and inventory management. Queueing models have been proven to generate reliable results for general settings with minimum input data. Despite its obvious advantages, queueing theory has been underutilized in solving healthcare system operational problems because of the required modeling assumptions and the difficulty encountered in solving those models.