Hospital Capacity Planning Using Discrete Event Simulation Under Special Consideration of the COVID-19 Pandemic

We present a resource-planning tool for hospitals under special consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic, called babsim.hospital. It provides many advantages for crisis teams, e.g., comparison with their own local planning, simulation of local events, simulation of several scenarios (worst / best case). There are benefits for medical professionals, e.g, analysis of the pandemic at local, regional, state and federal level, the consideration of special risk groups, tools for validating the length of stays and transition probabilities. Finally, there are potential advantages for administration, management, e.g., assessment of the situation of individual hospitals taking local events into account, consideration of relevant resources such as beds, ventilators, rooms, protective clothing, and personnel planning, e.g., medical and nursing staff. babsim.hospital combines simulation, optimization, statistics, and artificial intelligence processes in a very efficient way. The core is a discrete, event-based simulation model.