Efficient analysis for emergency management using simulation metamodeling: a case study for a medical trauma center.

This paper presents a rapid, quantitative simulation-based approach for Systems Engineering applicable to the emergency management domain. The motivation behind this approach is to provide improved decision-support for emergencies. A case study is performed on a problem in the healthcare domain concerning the effect of worker capacities in a trauma center. The application of simulation to healthcare systems analysis is a growing area, but analysis with large-scale simulations can be inefficient due to their long run times. This problem can be overcome by simulation metamodeling that provides the ability to expedite system evaluations and enable complex systems analysis. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of simulation metamodeling for healthcare systems analysis. The methodology developed for this case study has the potential to be transferred or applied to other scenarios for emergency management.