Logistics services within hospitals impact 15-20% of operating costs. These services include moving patients, transporting linens, meals, medicines, equipment, and samples between clinics, wards, operating rooms, laboratories, and warehouses.
Digitization, automation, and robotic technologies can optimize these processes through solutions that enable the automatic transportation of patients and materials and the automatic management of the hospital warehouse.
The main difference with respect to factory logistics systems is the need to operate in anthropogenic environments.
A robotic systems will be devised capable of interacting with humans (patients, medical / nursing staff, visiting relatives) in an intuitive and safe way.
In the "hospital 4.0" model, the automation system for logistics represents a further integrated node within the ICT network for the management of services, whose architecture is typically distributed in turn and whose management and analysis methodologies are typical of the Data Analysis presented in the previous point.
By extending this integration to a "smart grid" for utility management, it is possible to increase the energy efficiency of the logistics system. However, this integration makes it possible to obtain a considerable containment of the power peaks required from the grid ("peak shaving"), with consequent containment of the expenditure for electricity consumption.
We want to evaluate the integration of typical methodologies of energy optimization with the management of logistics automation in order to ensure the safe execution of all critical operations by controlling and, if possible, optimizing energy consumption.