A Cell-Based Method to Support Hospital Refurbishment

Hospital refurbishments often take place in parallel to regular operation, resulting in a scheduling problem: Construction activities must located such as they do not clash with daily work activities and vice versa. To be able to see this mutual influence, we have devised a tool in which we are able to visualize the adverse effects of construction on daily operation. The approach uses a cellular automaton to represent the three-dimensional hospital environment and uses a particle simulation for computing the distribution of dust, noise and vibrations. By interactively relocating work activities and construction activities, our tool can be used to solve the mentioned scheduling problem. It also enables us to show the sequence of construction and relocation activities in 3D, which might be easier to interpret than a classical project plan in tabular form.