The home health care routing and scheduling problem with interdependent services

Abstract

This paper presents a model for the daily planning of health care services carried out at patients' homes by staff members of a home care company. The planning takes into account individual service requirements of the patients, individual qualifications of the staff and possible interdependencies between different service operations. Interdependencies of services can include, for example, a temporal separation of two services as is required if drugs have to be administered a certain time before providing a meal. Other services like handling a disabled patient may require two staff members working together at a patient's home. The time preferences of patients are included in terms of given time windows. In this paper, we propose a planning approach for the described problem, which can be used for optimizing economical and service oriented measures of performance. A mathematical model formulation is proposed together with a powerful heuristic based on a sophisticated solution representation.

A genetic algorithm for a workforce scheduling and routing problem

“…and customers are patients receiving health care at their home. Several features are important in solutions to HHC scenarios, such as as distance travelled, assigning all visits, customers and workers requirements and preferences [16]. Thus, it is desirable that a good quality plan for a HHC planning problem has all those features while minimising operational cost.…”

Solving a More Flexible Home Health Care Scheduling and Routing Problem with Joint Patient and Nursing Staff Selection

“…Considering different preferences, they introduced visit clustering schemes and developed a branch and price solution algorithm. An HHC problem with interdependent services was studied by Mankowska et al [29]. They developed neighborhood search based efficient heuristic methods, capable of handling the synchronization requirements as well as large sized problems.…”

Disruption Management for the Real-Time Home Caregiver Scheduling and Routing Problem

“…Moreover, they use the visit clustering technique to accelerate the B & P algorithm. Mankowska et al [28] propose an adaptive VNS algorithm to solve the HCSRP with interdependent services and staff member-patient compatibility. Yuan et al [29] devise a B & P algorithm for the HCSRP with stochastic service times and skill requirements.…”