Flow of patients to the hospitals, scheduling and layout of resources for disaster operations can be
realistically modeled using discrete event simulation. For this reason, in this paper, activities in
response phase of disaster management, from rescue of the victims to the end of their treatment, are
modeled via simulation.
The purpose of this study is to present a detailed simulation model encapsulating both of closely
related victim transportation and treatment processes, and to use the simulation model with real-life
data in a case study to find out how to manage the constrained resources better and decrease total
loss of lives.
Section 2 of this study presents literature review on the subject. The details of the simulation model
are presented in section 3. The simulation model is built by using real-life data from İzmir Province
Disaster and Emergency Management Center, İzmir Healthcare System Management and the three
major hospitals in Bornova, İzmir using ARENA simulation software (version 10.0). Izmir is the
third largest city in Turkey and is one of the few metropolitan areas, which has significant
earthquake risk. Bornova is one of the most populated central districts of Izmir with a population
approaching 450,000. The detailed case study conducted for Bornova can subsequently be scaled up
to larger cities. Section 4 includes an extensive experimental design and findings obtained by
statistical analysis of the results from the experimental design, performed using the proposed.
Finally, section 5 concludes the paper with suggestions on future work.