this thesis is centered around the topic of emergency department(ed) optimization. working in conjunction with the thunder bay regional health sciences centre a simulation model was developed to determine an optimal physician schedule for the high acuity portion of the ed. the simulation uses patients generated based on the data provided. the simulation accounts for resource usage and coordinating physician patient interaction. as a secondary component to the thesis the minimum cut problem is investigated, as it has potential in aiding physicians in the ed. during this investigation a local search algorithm is proposed and the effects of parallelization are investigated.