Zhuoran Jia

Zhuoran Jia

PhD Candidate at TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture

Zhuoran Jia defended her PhD thesis titled “A Hospital Design Support System: Addressing Hospital Layout Design Challenges in China” on November 8, 2025, at Delft University of Technology. The aim of the thesis was to develop a decision-support system — the Hospital Design Support System (HDSS) — that brings early operational insight into hospital layout design by treating hospitals as dual complex systems: functionally, as networks of intricate medical procedures, and spatially, as small urban environments where corridors act as streets and spatial units as land uses.

The work first introduces the Hospital Configuration Model (HCM), a structured dataset capturing geometric, topological, semantic, and operational information about a hospital layout, which serves as the foundation for the HDSS. Building on the HCM, the HDSS combines three core models: a Four-Step Transportation Model simulating the hospital’s city-like circulation to assess overcrowding, walking distances, and wayfinding difficulty; a Discrete-Event Simulation Model capturing the hospital’s factory-like operations to evaluate patient waiting times; and an Exploratory Network Analysis Model examining the underlying spatial logic of hospital layouts independent of specific functions. Results from these models are aggregated and normalized into a common functional unit, enabling fair comparison across hospitals of different scales, and giving architects, hospital administrators, and head nurses a robust tool for evaluating layout alternatives during early design stages.

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Image Credit: Z. Jia et al.