A Continuous Petri Net Model for the Management and Design of Emergency Cardiology Departments

The efficient management of the Emergency Department (ED) has become an important issue in the past decade. Indeed, the increased demand for emergency services has saturated the capacity of EDs that require suitable tools for the efficient flow of work and people. The paper proposes a model to describe in a concise and effective way the structure and dynamics of a critical ED of the general hospital of Bari (Italy): the Emergency Cardiology Department (ECD). The model describes in a continuous Petri net framework the complete workflow and management of patients starting from their arrival to the ED until either their discharge from the hospital or their admission in a suitable hospital department. The fluid approximation allows defining suitable optimization problems to optimize the system performances and determine the optimal resource dimension guaranteeing the efficient management of the ECD. A simulation study shows that the optimized parameters lead to an effective workflow organization while maximizing the patient flow.