Modeling and Simulation of a French Extended White Plan: A Hospital Evacuation Before a Forecasted Flood

Abstract

As high level emergencies can have serious consequences on hospital activities, an emergency management plan to face a crisis situation must be specified and assessed. Even though more and more research is devoted to this area, most studies are based on academic assumptions and the proposed improvement methods are difficult to be applied in the real world. This paper addresses the French Extended White Plan i.e. a hospital evacuation plan facing a flood based on a real life scenario. First, a global model is built, using linear programming to roughly estimate the resources needed for an evacuation and to get a lower bound of the evacuation time. Second, a detail model is proposed in two steps, using the software, ARIS and SIMIO. In the first step, a frame model, which considers the processes of the vested interest actors and the information flow among them, is established to get the sequence of events based on activities from the ARIS diagrams. In the second step, a simulation model, which integrates the information transmission and the different activities, is proposed based on the frame model in the SIMIO programme. The correctness of the detail model has been checked, using the linear model results and the rationality of the simulation model is verified by various experiments. Through experiments, the best way to assign the resource has been found and two organizational improvements have been proposed. With such improvements, 1 h and 18 min is saved in evacuating all the patients and the improvement rate is as high as 26.2%. Thus, our work can provide some guidelines for managers who work in hospitals to improve their evacuation management plan.