Starting the simulation from a fixed point?

[Christina Seo]

Hi all,

Thank you for your previous guidance, I've been working on a sim model of an emergency department and have the base model complete for scenario testing.

One thing we are considering would be the possibility of making more "real-time" decisions using the model. For example, given the current state of the ED, what should we change in this moment to decrease wait times? 

To do this, the simulation would first need to replicate the current state in terms of queue sizes and different acuity level patients. 

One way I was thinking about doing this is artificially creating this situation (for example, in the first hour 50 patients arrive when usually it may be 10-20 per hour, and the model is run for a short time to distribute the patients), but this method cannot ensure that the later queues are the appropriate length, only the first couple processes' queues. 

Another potential could be creating a new entity generator for each queue that only generates patients in the first hour to artificially create the correct queues, and shuts off for the rest of the run once new patients arrive through the regular flow.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or guidance!

Thanks,

Christina