Constructing Constraint-Based Simulation System for Creating Emergency Evacuation Plans: A Case of an Outpatient Chemotherapy Area at a Cancer Medical Center

Abstract

Making emergency evacuation plans for disaster prevention is always a high priority for hospital administrators to ensure the safety of patients and employees. This study employs the outpatient chemotherapy area of a cancer medical center as an example, and its area involves professional medical care and relatively complex human group behaviors. Hence, it is necessary to simulate evacuations in advance to formulate a special evacuation plan. To achieve this task, a constraint-based simulation system is developed with three major processes: defining spatial and activity constraints, agent-based modeling, and optimizing resource allocation. The spatial boundaries are converted from a three-dimensional model in the Building Information Modeling (BIM) to conduct a visualized simulation. Based on the spatial boundaries, the activities of the agents are set to obey the process specified by work studies. Finally, the Monte Carlo method is employed to simulate the stochastic rescue behaviors of nurses during disasters to determine the fittest resource allocation with the shortest evacuation time for different numbers of patients. The results reveal that the proposed system can output a suggested list of resource allocations and visualized results for administrators when making evacuation plans such that all the people in the area can be safely evacuated.