Queueing Models and Optimization for Healthcare System Design and Improvement

在过去二十年中，模拟一直是医疗保健运营管理的主要工具。尽管它能够通过将所有细节合并到单个模型中来模拟复杂的随机系统，但仿真模型主要用于验证和实际实现。排队模型对于在具有固有不确定性的情况下开发对操作决策制定的有价值的见解非常有用，并且已经越来越多地用于解决电信、灵活制造和库存管理等领域的复杂问题。排队模型已被证明可以在最小输入数据的一般设置下生成可靠的结果。尽管排队理论具有明显的优势，但由于需要建模假设以及在求解这些模型时遇到的困难，排队理论在解决医疗保健系统操作问题方面尚未得到充分利用。

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.