Abdominal surgery process modeling frameworkfor simulation using spreadsheets

Abstract

We provide a continuation of the existing Activity Table Modeling methodology with a modu-lar spreadsheets simulation. The simulation model developed is comprised of 28 modelingelements for the abdominal surgery cycle process. The simulation of a two-week patientflow in an abdominal clinic with 75 beds demonstrates the applicability of the methodol-ogy. The simulation does not include macros, thus programming experience is not essentialfor replication or upgrading the model. Unlike the existing methods, the proposed solu-tion employs a modular approach for modeling the activities that ensures better readability,the possibility of easily upgrading the model with other activities, and its easy extensionand connectives with other similar models. We propose a first-in-first-served approach forsimulation of servicing multiple patients. The uncertain time duration of the activities ismodeled using the function “rand()”. The patients movements from one activity to the nextone is tracked with nested “if()” functions, thus allowing easy re-creation of the processwithout the need of complex programming