Patients arriving in groups

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Raul R3 asked Sep 11, '19 Cliff King edited Sep 12, '19

Patients arriving in groups

Hello all,

In my model, patients arrive using an elevator. Therefore, they constantly arrive in groups. Those groups can be composed of 2 to 5 patients. However, they can also arrive individually. I'd like to know if I can make my arrival pattern create those groups randomly, without altering my arrival-time distribution. The percentages are as follow:

Individual 20%

Pairs 21%

Groups of 3 19%

Groups of 4 18%

Groups of 5 22%

Attached is my current model.

oftalmologia.fsm

Software Version:

FlexSim HC 5.3.10

groups patient arrivals patients

oftalmologia.fsm (330.3 KiB)

Answer 1 · 2019-09-11T23:52:20Z

Cliff King answered Sep 11, '19 Cliff King edited Sep 12, '19

I'm not sure I understand. The elevator will group the patients automatically due to the elevator's available space, right? Maybe this was your modeling technique to achieve grouping, but what you really want is to define your groups in the patient arrival definition. This is possible too.

To create groups of patients arriving at specific times (or within a defined period), you should use the Custom Arrivals. Have you looked at that table on the arrival object? It's my favorite because it allows me define arrivals in a very flexible way. The time periods can be anything you want, and the number of arrivals within the period can be defined with a distribution as well. Let me know if you need help with this!

· 1

Cliff King commented · Sep 12, 2019 at 05:17 PM

After rereading your question and looking at the way you've defined your arrivals in the model you sent, I think I better understand what you are wanting to accomplish.

Are the two patient arrival objects you have in your model essentially creating "elevator arrival events" and now all you want to do is define the number of passengers that will be associated with each elevator event (a number between 2 and 5)? If this is what you want to do, I think you can easily make that happen by creating "companions" to arrive with the patient. It's worth a try!

You can try creating your companions either in the On Creation Trigger of the arrival objects, or maybe to ensure all the people in the group "ride" the elevator, you may want to delay creating the patient's companions until the OnExit trigger of the elevator. You'll have to experiment. Look for the Create > Companions pick list option in the triggers. The trigger option allows you to specify the PCI for the companions.

You will want to give the companions the same PCI as the patient getlabel(patient,"PCI"). You will also want to specify the number of companions to be the group size minus 1 to account for the original patient created already. Something like this: duniform(2,5) - 1

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