Multi-objective homecare worker scheduling: A fuzzy simulated evolution algorithm approach

Abstract

As the need for improved homecare services continues to rise in every society, homecare service providers need to develop efficient staff scheduling methods. Homecare services are aimed at providing medical, paramedical, and social aid to patients at their own homes, leading to reduced hospitalization and healthcare operations costs in the medium to long term. However, the home healthcare worker scheduling problem is a complex one since it combines the hard vehicle routing and the staff assignment problems. As such, the purpose of this research is to present a fuzzy simulated evolution algorithm, based on fuzzy evaluation techniques, to address the homecare worker scheduling problem in a home care environment. The main objective is to decide on (i) which patients to assign to each worker, and (ii) the best route or trip for each care giver to execute the healthcare tasks so as to satisfy the patient's preferences in the time window during which the care giver should visit and offer the requested healthcare service. Computational results on illustrative experiments show that the proposed algorithm is a promising decision support tool.