A Hybrid Approach to Solve the Periodic Home Health Care Problem

Jörg Steeg () and Michael Schröder
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Jörg Steeg: Fraunhofer Institut für Wirtschafts- und Technomathematik
Michael Schröder: Fraunhofer Institut für Wirtschafts- und Technomathematik

A chapter in Operations Research Proceedings 2007, 2008, pp 297-302 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Home health care (HHC) services provide nursing assistance to the elderly with the advantage of allowing them to continue living at their homes. Usually a HHC service has a fleet of vehicles that are used by nurses to get to the patients, where they have to perform a specified job. The HHC problem consists of the following task: assign a nurse to each job such that several conflicting objective functions are minimized, while a number of constraints are met. From a mathematical point of view, this problem is hard to solve, since it combines two well-known NP-hard problems: the vehicle routing problem and the nurse rostering problem. Our main objective is to minimize the number of nurses that visit a patient during the schedule: the nurse-patient loyalty. We consider this loyalty as a main indicator for a good schedule. Additionally, we have a periodic model, i.e. we do not only want to assign the nurses for one day, but we usually want to plan for a whole scheduling horizon, typically a week. As a solution approach, we propose a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of constraint programming and the large neighborhood search metaheuristic.

Keywords: Home Health; Large Neighborhood Search; Construction Heuristic; Nurse Rostering; Schedule Horizon (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77903-2_46

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