A Decentralized Approach to the Home Healthcare Problem

In this chapter, we try to improve health care services, particularly the Home Health Care Problem (HHCP). In fact, Home Health Care Service (HHCS) is known as a care mode allowing patients who suffer from complex and evolving diseases to benefit at home from medical and paramedical coordinated care that can be only provided in hospitals. In this chapter, we treat the Caregivers’ Tours Problem (CTP) and conflict management sanitary visits to patients’ homes. We developed a new distributed three-phase approach, which both optimizes the daily caregivers’ tours to minimize the travel costs and maximizes the planned services in order to address potential conflicts. The obtained numerical results, compared with those provided by the other existing approaches, are motivating and encouraging.