Hospital layout significantly influences hospital service quality, demanding robust tools for informed decision-making during the layout design stage. This study presents a novel Hospital Configuration Model as the foundational component of a Hospital Design Support System, which utilizes simulation modeling to provide evaluation mechanisms on hospital efficiencies and functionalities. The Hospital Configuration Model integrates four critical data types—geometric, topological, semantic, and operational—into a machine-readable digital twin, enabling comprehensive spatial and procedural analyses. The Hospital Configuration Model facilitates simulation modeling to optimize hospital layouts and predict performance metrics such as crowdingness, patient waiting times, patient walking distance, and difficulty in wayfinding. In conclusion, the Hospital Configuration Model is the core and foundation of developing the Hospital Design Support System for evaluating hospital functionalities and efficiencies, and the potential applications of the model include digital twin development, facility management, and safety enhancement. Future research directions should, in particular, include developing the proposed Hospital Design Support System and establishing a standard way of extracting hospital operational information into an industry-standard data model.

Hospital layout design plays a crucial role in ensuring operational efficiency. This research develops a Hospital Design Support System, a data-driven framework that integrates the Four-Step Transportation Model, Discrete-Event Simulation, and Exploratory Network Analysis to systematically assess hospital layout performance in terms of operational efficiency. The HDSS evaluates four key criteria: spatial crowdedness, patient waiting times, patient walking distances, and difficulty in wayfinding. Hospitals exhibit spatial and operational characteristics akin to small cities and factories, making transportation planning and Discrete-Event Simulation highly applicable in evaluating hospital layout performances in terms of the four operational criteria. Exploratory Network Analysis further reveals the inherent structural tendencies that impact hospital efficiency and resilience. Additionally, evaluation mechanisms, including aggregation, relativization, and interpretation, translate disaggregated simulation outputs into actionable metrics, enabling comparative assessment of design alternatives. This study contributes a systematic approach to hospital layout evaluation, offering valuable insights for architects and policymakers aiming to enhance hospital layout design.

IFC2BCM is a novel software tool designed to generate IndoorGML and Building Configuration Models (BCM) from IFC/BIM models. The primary motivation behind IFC2BCM is to develop a tool for generating BCM as the core foundation of a Spatial Design Support System that will evaluate layout designs of complex buildings such as hospitals regarding operational efficiency. The software addresses the need for detailed spatial network analysis and simulation modelling in complex environments, offering a semi-automatic process to convert IFC data into IndoorGML, and subsequently into a comprehensive BCM. The BCM generated by this tool consists of geometric, topological, semantic, and operational information, it supports applications such as space optimization, facility management, ensuring safety, and indoor navigation. More generally, the results are relevant to the study of complex buildings such as airports, transport hubs, public buildings, etc.

This study presents a systematic review of the literature on decision support for designing hospital layouts using spatial network analysis and/or simulation modelling. The review includes 102 articles, which are classified into five different categories concerning their layout-related challenges. Specifically, the categories include overcrowding, patient waiting times, visibility & staff interaction, wayfinding & walkability, and other issues such as hospital-acquired infections. The main finding is the cross-referenced table of different performance issues related to the hospital layout to different assessment methods, indicators, and quality criteria. The review suggests prospects for associating hospital design problems/challenges with spatial layout, as well as a framework for developing methods for layout representation, aggregation and relativization borrowing from the fields of transport planning and operations research. The main focus of this study lies in the spatial layout. Viewing the spatial complexity of a hospital as an indoor spatial environment is at least as complex as an urban environment, thus justifying a geographical approach; hence we expand the scope of the literature review to papers that may not directly address hospital design but have relations to spatial decision support systems.