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OVERTIME PROBLEM
Hello everyone, I'm doing a simulation for an operating compartment. I have scheduled the patients for 111 days and every day the patients have a different entry time. To do this I used the "spreadsheet" function in the start point. The entry time was scheduled with a starting time of 7:45 on 02/15/2022 and patients enter after "x minutes" (marked in the spreadsheet connected to the entrance). For example if in the spreadsheet I entered
Minutes patients
10 1
30 1
5 1
20 1
On 02/15/2022 at 7:55 a patient enters, at 8:15 a second patient and on 02/16/2022 a patient enters at 7:50 and another patient at 8:05
The simulation clock runs from 7:45 to 20:00
Some patients are in the operating room after 20:00 which is why I wanted to add 240 minutes of overtime to the clock. The problem is here, with overtime, patients are processed even when it is not necessary, specifically they start entering the compartment from midnight instead of 7:45. Can anyone tell me the reason?
I was advised to add 465 minutes to the scheduling minutes in the spreadsheet so that instead of 00:00 patients enter from 7:45 but** also in this case two problems** arise:
1. If I run the simulation for 1 day at the end of the day the simulation clock is set to 23:59 on 02/16/2022 instead of 02/15/2022
2. I cannot understand the results of overtime in the operating room. For the first day I should have an overtime of 25 minutes as the patient leaves the room at 20:25 instead of 20:00. I have set up to 240 minutes of overtime. So there should be a % utilization of around 10.4%, right? The simul8 results instead tell me: awaiting: 28.6% and working: 71.3%
Can someone help me?
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Hello Laura, I have not used schedules with overtime so I cannot help you on that.
I have however used overtime before and the statistics are not calculated that way in Simul8. It calculates the percentages based on how much of the overtime the specific activity is in use. In other words, though you set overtime to 240 minutes. That is just the max overtime your simulation can have and Simul8 will only use the extra time it needs to clear out any work items left. Based on that time calculates how much each activity was used in that time frame.
Hopefully this helps you understand the statistics your seeing a bit better!