Layout Planning Problems in Health Care

In general, layout planning problems can be classified as in-house location problems where the aim is to minimize the total pairwise communication or material handling costs based on distances by deciding on the relative positions of any kind of organizational units inside a building. In this chapter the focus is on a hospital layout planning problem where 25 organizational units have to be located on 6 levels of a hospital building. In order to solve the problem, a graph-theoretical approach is applied using real-world data. Furthermore, the idea of an iterative simulation-optimization approach is presented.