Resource planning for hospitals under special consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic: Optimization and sensitivity analysis

Abstract

Pandemics pose a serious challenge to health-care institutions. To support the resource planning of health authorities from the Cologne region, BaBSim.Hospital, a tool for capacity planning based on discrete event simulation, was created. The predictive quality of the simulation is determined by 29 parameters with reasonable default values obtained in discussions with medical professionals. We aim to investigate and optimize these parameters to improve BaBSim.Hospital using a surrogate-based optimization approach and an in-depth sensitivity analysis.