Mathematical model and exact algorithm for the home care worker scheduling and routing problem with lunch break requirements

Ran Liu, Biao Yuan and Zhibin Jiang

International Journal of Production Research, 2017, vol. 55, issue 2, 558-575

Abstract: Home health care or home care (HHC/HC) refers to the delivery of social, medical and paramedical services to clients in their own homes. Each day, care workers start from the HHC/HC centre, visit some clients and return to the centre. During the service delivery process, there is usually a lunch break for each worker. In this paper, we address a real-life home care worker scheduling and routing problem with the consideration of lunch break requirements. A three-index mathematical model is constructed for the problem. The problem is decomposed into a master problem and several pricing sub-problems, and is optimally solved by a branch-and-price (B&P) algorithm. Specifically, a sophisticated label-correcting algorithm is designed to address lunch break constraints in pricing sub-problems; some cutting-edge acceleration strategies are applied during the column generation process. Experimental results show that the proposed B&P algorithm is able to produce satisfied solutions within an acceptable runtime and outperforms the mixed integer programming solver CPLEX.

Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2016.1213917

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