Optimal patient and personnel scheduling policies for care-at-home service facilities

P.M. Koeleman, S. Bhulai and M. van Meersbergen

European Journal of Operational Research, 2012, vol. 219, issue 3, 557-563

Abstract: In this paper we study the problem of personnel planning in care-at-home facilities. We model the system as a Markov decision process, which leads to a high-dimensional control problem. We study monotonicity properties of the system and derive structural results for the optimal policy. Based on these insights, we propose a trunk reservation heuristic to control the system. We provide numerical evidence that the heuristic yields close to optimal performance, and scales well for large problem instances.

Keywords: OR in health services; Care-at-home facilities; Markov decision processes; Personnel planning; Scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:219:y:2012:i:3:p:557-563

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2011.10.046

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