Impact of the workload definition on the multi-objective home health care problem

Abstract

Home health care services provide nursing and general hygiene cares in patient homes. Recently, structures providing home health care tend to optimize their activities leading to an increased interest in this problem. An important aspect of the problem is the balancing of the workload between the caregivers. The workload can be defined as the aggregation of several times: the travel time, the time spent on providing cures and the idle time. Because of its multi-objective nature, it is important to find a good compromise between the minimization of working time, the non-satisfaction of patients’ soft time window and synchronization constraints, and the workload balancing. In order to analyze the trade-off between the various objectives, we propose to model the home health care routing and scheduling problem as a multi-objective problem. Different definitions of the workload are studied in order to analyze their impacts on the trade-off between the objectives. A metaheuristic from the literature is used for the experiments. The results highlight the importance of workload definition on the trade-off between the different objectives and the ease of optimizing one objective over the others.