Simple approximate analysis for parallel queues with patients' deteriorating health conditions

When a mass-causality disaster occurs, triage, i.e., categorization based on patients' severity, is usually used in disaster and emergency medicine. It is important to plan an efficient allocation of the medical resources taking into account the waiting patients' deteriorating health conditions. To this end, it is necessary to predict the congestion of patients waiting for their treatments. In this paper, we consider a queueing model with two categorized customers and generally distributed patience times, where the patient times refer to times until the patients' categories change due to their deteriorating health conditions. For this model, we propose an approximate method to evaluate the system performance. We give some numerical examples of the approximation method, and compare those with simulation results. Those numerical examples indicate the validation of the precision of the proposed approximate method.