The Sustainable Home Health Care Process Based on Multi-Criteria Decision-Support

Filipe Alves, Lino A. Costa, Ana Maria A. C. Rocha (), Ana I. Pereira and Paulo Leitão
Additional contact information
Filipe Alves: ALGORITMI Research Centre/LASI, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal
Lino A. Costa: ALGORITMI Research Centre/LASI, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal
Ana Maria A. C. Rocha: ALGORITMI Research Centre/LASI, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal
Ana I. Pereira: Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics (CeDRI), Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253 Bragança, Portugal
Paulo Leitão: Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics (CeDRI), Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253 Bragança, Portugal

Mathematics, 2022, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: The increase in life expectancy has led to a growing demand for Home Health Care (HHC) services. However, some problems can arise in the management of these services, leading to high computational complexity and time-consuming to obtain an exact and/or optimal solution. This study intends to contribute to an automatic multi-criteria decision-support system that allows the optimization of several objective functions simultaneously, which are often conflicting, such as costs related to travel (distance and/or time) and available resources (health professionals and vehicles) to visit the patients. In this work, the HHC scheduling and routing problem is formulated as a multi-objective approach, aiming to minimize the travel distance, the travel time and the number of vehicles, taking into account specific constraints, such as the needs of patients, allocation variables, the health professionals and the transport availability. Thus, the multi-objective genetic algorithm, based on the NSGA-II, is applied to a real-world problem of HHC visits from a Health Unit in Bragança (Portugal), to identify and examine the different compromises between the objectives using a Pareto-based approach to operational planning. Moreover, this work provides several efficient end-user solutions, which were standardized and evaluated in terms of the proposed policy and compared with current practice. The outcomes demonstrate the significance of a multi-criteria approach to HHC services.

Keywords: multi-criteria optimization; home health care; planning; metaheuristic; decision-support system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/11/1/6/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/11/1/6/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:11:y:2022:i:1:p:6-:d:1008806

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematics is currently edited by Ms. Emma He

More articles in Mathematics from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().