An integer linear model for hospital bed planning

In this paper we investigate the hospital bed management problem. Constrained by budgetary cuts. French hospitals must efficiently manage shared resources, especially beds, which are allocated to acute and elective patients. Nurses therefore have to manage beds and to plan their use according to the demand, including cases of acute patients from the emergency ward. Managing hospital bed planning is difficult due to the demand increase and restricted hospital resources. Our aim is to propose a decision support tool based on an integer linear program for hospital bed planning, considering two classes of patients: elective and acute cases. We take into account several constraints: incompatibility between pathologies, no mixed-sex rooms, continuity of care, etc. In order to solve the proposed model and to compare the results, we use three solver softwares: GLPK, LINGO of LINDO SYSTEMS and CPLEX of ILOG. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.