Task-splitting in home healthcare routing and scheduling

Loek van Montfort, Wout Dullaert and Markus Leitner

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2025, vol. 202, issue C

Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of task-splitting into home healthcare (HHC) routing and scheduling. It focuses on the design of routes and timetables for caregivers providing services at patients’ homes. Task-splitting is the division of a (lengthy) patient visit into separate visits that can be performed by different caregivers at different times. The resulting split parts may have reduced caregiver qualification requirements, relaxed visiting time windows, or a shorter/longer combined duration. However, additional temporal dependencies can arise between them. To incorporate task-splitting decisions into the planning process, we introduce two different mixed integer linear programming formulations, a Miller–Tucker–Zemlin and a time-indexed variant. These formulations aim to minimize operational costs while simultaneously deciding which visits to split and imposing a potentially wide range of temporal dependencies. We also propose pre-processing routines for the time-indexed formulation and two heuristic procedures. These methods are embedded into the branch-and-bound approach as primal and improvement heuristics. The results of our computational study demonstrate the additional computational difficulty introduced by task-splitting possibilities and the associated additional synchronization, and the usefulness of the proposed heuristic procedures. From a planning perspective, our results indicate that integrating task-splitting decisions into the planning process reduces staff requirements, decreases HHC operational costs, and allows caregivers to spend relatively more time on tasks aligned with their qualifications.

Keywords: Home healthcare; Task-splitting; Temporal dependencies; Vehicle routing; Caregiver scheduling; Synchronization; Integer programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2025.104235

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