Home health care routing and scheduling problem with the consideration of outpatient services

Yanfeng Li, Ting Xiang and Wai Yuen Szeto

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2021, vol. 152, issue C

Abstract: In China, family doctor contract service can provide not only the home health care service for the elderly or patients with mobility difficulties at their homes but also the outpatient service mainly for ordinary patients in the community care center. This paper presents a home health care routing and scheduling problem with the consideration of outpatient services. By considering the constraints about time windows, skill requirements, and working regulations, the problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear and convex programming model to minimize the total travel costs of the door-to-door service and the total waiting penalties of out-patients, and maximize the total benefit of patients’ preference satisfaction. We adopt an outer-approximation method to obtain its global ε-optimal solutions for the small scale problem and develop a hybrid genetic algorithm to solve the large problem. A small instance is set up to analyze the problem properties and the performance of the outer-approximation method. The results of large scale examples show that the proposed hybrid genetic algorithm can provide high-quality solutions with short computing times.

Keywords: Home health care scheduling; Vehicle routing problem; Door-to-door service; Outpatient service; Patient preference satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2021.102420

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