Continuity Between Planning Periods in the Home Health Care Problem

Abstract

Home health care providers face a complex routing and scheduling task to plan their services because their clients stay at their own homes. As the solution of this task may be inefficient or infeasible for a subsequent planning period, a new optimization is inevitable at the end of each period. The consideration of continuity in multi-period planning by avoiding extensive changes between periods is essential to ensure client and nurse satisfaction. To address this issue, we consider the home health care problem in a rolling planning horizon. Our heuristic solution method determines a new plan while preserving the continuity between periods. Since there are many possibilities to quantify continuity, we compare different measures and show their impact on the solutions.