A New Decomposition Approach for the Home Health Care Problem

Abstract

Home Health Care (HHC) is a relatively new service that plays an important role to reduce hospitalization costs and improve the life quality for patients. Human resource planning is one of the most important processes in HHC systems, for which service providers have to deal with several operational problems, e.g., the assignment of operators to patients together with their routing process. In the literature, either these problems have been simultaneously solved, or decomposed by first solving the assignment problem and then the routing problem. In this work, we propose an alternative approach, where the decomposition is based on the First Route and Second Assign (FRSA) approach. An instance generation mechanism is developed as well, which generates instances inspired from real HHC providers, to test the proposed FRSA approach under different circumstances. Preliminary experiments show the effectiveness of the approach.