Supporting Emergency Department Risk Mitigation with a Modular and Reusable Agent-Based Simulation Infrastructure

For emergency departments (EDs) to maintain sustainable care of patients, hospital management must continually explore potential interventions to clinical practice. Agent-based modelling (ABM) can be a valuable tool to support this planning in a controlled environment. Existing approaches to ABM development are best suited for one-off models. However, conditions in EDs can change frequently, making the use of one-off models infeasible. Decision-makers must be able to trust simulations appropriately for them to be effective in intervention exploration. Domain-specific modelling languages (DSMLs) can address these challenges by offering a reusable library of appropriately-abstract, domain-familiar, modelling concepts across case studies and automatic translation of these concepts into executable models. In this paper we present a DSML to support repeated modelling exercises in the ED domain and illustrate the use and reuse of this DSML across two concrete case studies in London-based NHS emergency departments.