Bed allocation for a surgical ward
Which bed does each patient get — so everyone admitted finds a fitting bed and nobody waits in the emergency department?
Drag to rotate, scroll or pinch to zoom. The schedule below plays the plan; hover a bar for details. Plan from OptaZEN’s own local search (late acceptance) on the same model; in a project we build it with Timefold.
The planning question
The surgical ward of a hospital: 65 beds in two-bed rooms and a few single rooms. Over a busy week, planned and emergency admissions arrive for orthopaedics, general surgery and trauma surgery. Assigning the first free bed works until the rooms fill up — then two-bed rooms end up blocked by gender or isolation, single rooms go to patients who did not need them, and new patients wait in the emergency department.
How we plan it
Planning the whole week ahead keeps the right rooms free: a single room for the isolation case on Thursday or the patient who asked for one, matching genders in two-bed rooms.
What the plan shows
| KPI | Optimized plan | Comparison: first free bed at admission |
|---|---|---|
| patients in a ward bed | 121 +1 | 120 |
| boarded in the ED | 1 −1 | 2 |
| single-room wishes met | 73 % +64 | 9 % |
Decisions
- bed for every patient stay, from admission to discharge
Constraints
- one patient per bed, cleaning after discharge
- two-bed rooms: same gender at the same time
- isolation patients alone in the room
- single room where wished
Objective
every patient in a fitting bed, nobody waiting in the emergency department, single-room wishes met
Questions
Does it handle emergencies?
Yes. Emergency admissions arrive around the clock; the plan keeps room for them and re-plans when the day changes.
Is this a Timefold model?
This demo uses OptaZEN’s own local search on the same model; in a project we build it with Timefold (as in the bed-allocation quickstart).
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