Home care vehicle routing problem with chargeable overtime and strict and soft preference matching

Abstract

A new scheduling problem arising in the home care context is addressed, whose novelty with respect to the literature lies in the way overtime is paid. In this problem, some clients are willing to pay a higher fee to cover the additional overtime cost, if such overtime is incurred because a caregiver works extra time with the client to preserve continuity of care. These overtime hours charged to clients unburden the company, which no longer has to balance between cost and continuity of care in a traditional way. The problem is also studied in a context that includes preferences expressed by both clients and caregivers. Strict preferences must be respected with a high priority, while soft preferences increase the satisfaction and should be preferably respected. We formalize the problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Problem and also propose a cluster-based decomposition to solve real-life instances. The problem is inspired by the real case study of a provider operating in the USA. Numerical results validate the model and confirm the capability of the decomposition approach to deal with real-life instances.

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

“…To solve the problem, they use the epsilon constraint method and a metaheuristic approach for large instances. Malagodi et al (2021) formulate an MILP model for a home care vehicle routing problem. They aim to minimize the mismatches of strict and soft preferences over the works, overtime, and total travel time for all caregivers.…”

The assignment-dial-a-ride-problem

“…The first aspect of medical transportation is the nature of what is transported. It can be patients (e.g., [10], [11]), medical staff (e.g., [12], [13], [14]) or medical supplies (e.g., [15], [16]). In our study, we focus on the patient transportation.…”

A Matheuristic Approach for the Home Care Scheduling Problem With Chargeable Overtime and Preference Matching

“…Compared with the existing literature, this paper considers HCSP with multi-depot and long planning horizon characteristic and the caregivers are allowed not to go home at the end of a period. The payment mechanism that clients can choose to pay the overtime to get continuity of care has been rarely considered in the literature (only in our previous works [3] and [4]). Otherwise, we also consider matching requirements that have received little attention in previous HC problems, which are represented as the caregivers' and clients' preference, "Not send" and "Must go" lists by thorough investigation.…”

“…This problem was first formulated in [3], in which it has been formulated as a linear programming model and the problem has been solved exploiting a cluster-based decomposition. Then, in our preliminary conference paper [4], we proposed a simple Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithm to solve it.…”