A two-phases matheuristic for the home care routing and scheduling problem

Abstract

Home care services provide care for the elderly, disabled or patients with chronic diseases. The cares are performed by nurses or unlicensed assistive personnels depending on the care to provide at the patient’s home. Usually, the work routing and scheduling of the staff members are realized by an experienced nurse playing the role of the coordinator. However, this kind of manual planning has its limits as the demand tends to grow and it has to be done every day for the day after. After reviewing the existing literature on this problem, we propose a mixed-integer programming model focusing on the different types of staff member employed by home care services. The objective is to minimize the cost related to the transportation and the working hours. In order to find an optimal solution, we suggest two solving approaches: a one-phase solving method where the full data set are considered as input in order to find the best possible solution to the problem and a two-phases matheuristic in order to distinguish the scheduling of the nurses and the unlicensed assistive personnels. The approaches are then experimented on several instances of different sizes in order to compare them.