Developing a mathematical model for staff routing and scheduling in home health care industries: Genetic Algorithm based solution scheme

Abstract

Efficient management of providing home health care services requires many considerations. In this paper, a mathematical model for the daily staff routing and service scheduling is developed for home health care companies. In this model, both economic factors and qualitative serviceoriented performance measures are simultaneously optimized. To make the model more realistic, many real situations such as considering different qualifications and diverse vehicles for staff members, different requirements and predetermined preferences for patients, possible temporal interdependencies between services, and continuity of care (CoC) are taken into account. We also added some important constraints related to blood sampling requirements, which make our proposed model more complex. The proposed model is a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model that belongs to an NP-hard class of optimization problems. To solve such a complex mathematical model, a genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to find near-optimal 2 solutions. We use some randomly generated test instances with different sizes to evaluate the performance of the GA. Finally, it is demonstrated how the proposed solution scheme can end up with proper scheduling and routing policies compared to those obtained through exact methods.

A sustainable and efficient home health care network design model under uncertainty

“…They minimize costs, the penalty of the continuity of care violation, and the preference mismatch, and then use the weighted method to solve it. Entezari and Mahootchi (2021) propose an MILP model for staff routing and scheduling in HHC and develop a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to find near-optimal solutions. They aim to minimize their objective functions: travel times, tardiness in providing services, staff overtime, violation of care continuity, and violation of the staff’s time windows by the weighted method.…”

“…They propose a hybrid GA to tackle the problem. Entezari and Mahootchi (2021) study staff routing and scheduling in HHC industries, where a patient can require more than one service (independent or interdependent).…”

Simulation optimization approach for dynamic and stochastic closed loop supply chain network

“…In this study, a simulation model is coupled with GA to optimize designs and operations of forward and reverse networks in the supply chain. GA has been widely adopted in various problems due to its proven effectiveness (see [50][51][52][53] for detail). Azadivar and…”

Routing and scheduling in Home Health Care: A literature survey and bibliometric analysis

“…We can define 'Human continuity' by assigning the same staff member (or the same pool of staff members) to a given patient throughout the period. Usually, even in the most recent papers, such as (Demirbilek et al, 2019) or (Entezari and Mahootchi, 2020), only the first aspect is considered. Continuity of care is a reality and a concern for HCC agencies.…”