Dynamic routing-scheduling problem for home health care considering caregiver-patient compatibility

Abstract

This paper presents a two-stage mathematical formulation for the Home Health Care Routing- Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP) over a planning horizon of multiple days. To devise valid planning, skill requirements and the occurrence of unexpected events are taken into consideration. Caregiver-patient compatibility is another pivotal aspect of the problem, which the present study addresses for the first time. This concept refers to the desirability of the personal relationship between a caregiver and a patient, which plays a key role in fulfilling their satisfaction. The first stage minimizes the Total Planning Distance (TPD), while the second stage maximizes the total compatibility and deals with unexpected events. A health center located in Tehran is considered a case study to assess the validity of the suggested model and analyze the sensitivity of the objectives with the structural parameters, which in turn leads to some practical managerial insights. Due to the NP-hardness of the studied problem, a matheuristic-based algorithm is applied to reduce the computational time. The computational results approve the proposed solution algorithm’s decent performance in obtaining near-optimal solutions quickly.