An applied case of quadratic assignment problem in hospital department layout

This paper discusses the layout of different functional departments in the hospital. By relocating the departments overall, we aim to minimize the average walking time for the outpatients from the registry to their consulting departments, thus enhancing the hospital´s service efficiency. Actually, this is typically a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Since the hospital´s departments tend to vary in size, the paper presents a way of combining the small spaces to locate a larger department and dividing the large spaces to locate more than one smaller department. Then, as a variant of the quadratic assignment problem, an Integer Programming model is proposed to solve this layout problem. Finally, Tongji Hospital, a three-level hospital in Shanghai, is taken as a case, and the result shows that the average walking time for the outpatients is reduced from 96.26 seconds (before optimization) to 85.14 seconds (after optimization), decreasing by 11.55%.