A Home Health Care Planning Problem with Continuity of Care And Flexible Departing Way for Caregivers

Abstract This paper formulates a mixed-integer programming model for a mid-term home health care routing and scheduling problem with considering several real-life constraints, such as continuity of care, time window, qualification of caregivers, and a flexible departing way for caregivers. Three sub-objectives: operational cost, the satisfaction of patients, and workload balancing of caregivers are merged with the weights as the objective function. The model is addressed by a commercial solver Gurobi through the randomly generated instances inspired by Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (PVRPTW) benchmark. Computational results present that this problem can be solved efficiently. Furthermore, the relationship between sub-objectives and optimal results is discussed by changing weight allocation. This work offers HHC managements a proper method to respect practical constraints, achieve optimal objectives as well as find the optimal solution efficiency.