Speeding up decision support: Investigating the distributed simulation of a healthcare supply chain

Abstract

Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) is a decision support technique that allows stakeholders to conduct experiments with models that represent real-world systems of interest. Its use in healthcare is comparatively new. Healthcare needs have grown and healthcare organisations have become larger, more complex and more costly. There has never been a greater need for carefully informed decisions and policy. DES is valuable as it can provide evidence of how to cope with these complex health problems. However, the size of a healthcare system can lead to large models that can take an extremely long time to simulate. In this chapter we investigate how a technique called distributed simulation allows us to use multiple computers to speed up this simulation. Based on a case study of the UK National Blood Service (NBS) we demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique and argue that it is a vital technology in healthcare informatics with respect to supporting decision making in large healthcare systems.