Article ID: | iaor20105034 |
Volume: | 178 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 45 |
End Page Number: | 65 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2010 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Bekker R, Bruin A M |
Keywords: | queues: applications |
For capacity planning issues in health care, such as the allocation of hospital beds, the admissions rate of patients is commonly assumed to be constant over time. In addition to the purely random fluctuations, there is also typically a predictable pattern in the number of arriving patients. For example, roughly 2/3 of the admitted patients at an Intensive Care Unit arrives during office hours. Also, most of the scheduled admissions occur during weekdays instead of during the weekend. Using approximations based on the infinite-server queue, we analyze an