Causality in hospital simulation based on utilization chains
Gabriel Wurzer, Wolfgang E. Lorenz · Annual Simulation Symposium · 2014
The operation of complex buildings (e.g. airports, hospitals, industrial facilities, penitentiaries) is commonly simulated forward in time: Agents arrive and perform their prescribed tasks, utilizing resources and space as required. When trying to understand the model's state at a certain point in time, say, why is this resource over-utilized, one must either guess or run the simulation again to determine what the cause is. Our contribution lies in the introduction of causal chains into the workflow of an agent-based simulation, so that an end user (in our case: process planner and hospital architect) can get a further insight into the intermediate simulation result at a certain point in time, without having to re-run it.