A Robust Framework for Addressing Routing and Scheduling Challenges in Home Health Care

Abstract

The nature of routing and scheduling problems for providing services to patients called home health care problems would include a remarkable level of uncertainty. These uncertainties may be due to the traffic congestion, the accessibility levels to staff members, and the service times to the patients. This paper presents a robust formulation aimed at the daily/weekly/monthly routing and scheduling of staff members under uncertainty for home health care services, which simultaneously optimize the cost factors and the service quality measures. Different requirements and preferences of patients, diverse vehicles, different skills for staff, temporal inter-dependencies between services, Continuity Of Care (COC), and blood sampling requirements are considered to construct the Robust Optimization (RO) model. The robust solutions obtained through the mixedinteger linear programming model are compared to those obtained through the deterministic and Stochastic Optimization (SO) model using some randomly small-and medium-size generated instances to evaluate the performance of the RO model. Finally, we present some efficient managerial insights to substantiate the importance of considering uncertainty in the optimization models ending up with proper routing and scheduling policies.