A Study on the Improvement of Spatial Awareness and the Appropriate Service Distribution of Examination Centers using Pedestrian-based Discrete Event Simulations

Abstract

Background/Objectives: In an aging society and while economic conditions improve, the general public’s interest in health is increasing, and the concept of medical care is shifting from treatment to proactive management. Therefore, the health examination center is emerging from a medical auxiliary facility to a key and independent medical facility. However, medical facilities are not easy to design and improve because of the complex relationship between humans and space and the variable characteristics of humans.

Methods/Statistical analysis: This study used a medical examination center currently in operation as an example to analyze the issues and develop improved methods of applying a pedestrian-based discrete event simulation. Four evaluation and verification indicators were presented for the evaluation and a simulation analysis tool was developed to derive the indicators. After identifying the examination time and the number of people to be accommodated through the simulation, the problems were derived based on the flow of human traffic and cause of queues. After resolving the problems by reducing the waiting time through adjusting the number of services and improving the spatial awareness by rearranging the space, the effects of reducing the waiting time, increasing the number of people accommodated, and shortening the moving distance were demonstrated through verification analysis.

Findings: As a result of the study, the main reasons that extend the overall examination time was due to the increase and concentration of queues, which means that adjusting the number of services and the distribution of the queues to the services greatly helped to reduce the overall examination time.

Improvements/Applications: This study is a basic research intended to develop a program for analyzing the spatial environment of examination centers. Further studies will be performed to complement tasks such as improving spatial recognition by analyzing the examination sequence and improving data reliability through repeated simulations.

Keywords: Agent-based model, discrete event simulation, medical facility, spatial structure