Circulation management in hospitals during COVID-19

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing has been applied worldwide to reduce the risk of infection. In hospitals, this requires a new strategy for circulation management in the corridors to avoid cross-overs. In this thesis, we study the problem of routing and path-fnding in the hospital during the pandemic for two fows of patients, COVID-19 and Non-COVID, using as many disjoint paths as possible. We present two scenarios to model the routing and coloring of the hospital paths and compare them in simulations. The frst scenario uses an ofine method to establish a guideline for the patients when they do not have access to a cellphone or other smart technologies. The second scenario is an online method based on smart technology and real-time localization. Our dataset consists of a set of Non-COVID patients with scheduled appointments in diferent clinics and COVID-19/Non-COVID patients arriving at the emergency unit with a given arrival pattern. We evaluate the performance of the two proposed scenarios subject to diferent arrival rates of COVID-19 patients. The simulation result confrms that the proposed solutions outperform a baseline which is based on the Dijkstra algorithm. This thesis outcome will help increase safety by considering the guideline for COVID-19 and Non-COVID patients in healthcare centers during the pandemic.

Date	3 Mar 2023
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Kim Khoa Nguyen (Supervisor) & Brigitte Jaumard (Co-supervisor)