Abstract
Home healthcare (HHC) organisations provide coordinated healthcare services to patients at their homes. Motivated by the ever-increasing need for home-based care, the assignment of tasks to available healthcare staff is a common and complex problem in homecare organisations. Designing high quality task schedules is critical for improving worker morale, job satisfaction, service efficiency, service quality, and competitiveness over the long term. The desire is to provide high quality task assignment schedules that satisfy the patient, the care worker, and the management. This translates to maximising schedule fairness in terms of workload assignments, avoiding task time window violation, and meeting management goals as much as possible. However, in practice, these desires are often subjective as they involve imprecise human perceptions. This paper develops a fuzzy multi-criteria particle swarm optimisation (FPSO) approach for task assignment in a home healthcare setting in a fuzzy environment. The proposed approach uses a fuzzy evaluation method from a multi-criteria point of view. Results from illustrative computational experiments show that the approach is promising.
Highlights
Home healthcare (HHC) service providers are concerned with the provision of coordinated medical and paramedical services to patients in their homes [1]
In providing coordinated home care services, healthcare workers have to attend to acute illness, posthospitalisation, post-operation, chronic illness, permanent disability, terminal illness, or pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, and other related duties [2,3]
Particle swarm optimisation (PSO) is a stochastic optimisation technique that is inspired by the social behaviour of fish schooling and bird flocking [14,15]
Summary
Home healthcare (HHC) service providers are concerned with the provision of coordinated medical and paramedical services to patients in their homes [1]. The overall aim is to ensure that the preferences and goals of the three players – that is, the patient, the care worker, and management – are simultaneously satisfied from a multi-criteria view point. The ultimate goal is to improve the service quality of patient care and to satisfy the expectations of the healthcare professionals and the management, which is a complex multi-criteria problem. To provide a brief description of the task assignment problem for a home healthcare service set up; 2. To propose a fuzzy multi-criteria particle swarm optimisation approach to solve the care task assignment problem; and, 3. The objective is to limit, as much as possible, the variation of care workers’ individual workloads from the average workload, and the violation of the pre-specified task time window constraints The problem should be treated as a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making problem
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