Daily scheduling of home health care services using time-dependent public transport

This paper presents a real-world optimization problem in home health care that is solved on a daily basis. It can be described as follows: care staff members with different qualification levels have to visit certain clients at least once per day. Assignment constraints and hard time windows at the c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Flexible services and manufacturing journal 2016-09, Vol.28 (3), p.495-525
Main Authors: Rest, Klaus-Dieter, Hirsch, Patrick
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Buses (vehicles)
Clients
Engineering
Health care
Home health care
Machines
Manufacturing
Mathematical models
Operations Management
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Processes
Public transportation
Scheduling
Subways
Tabu search
Time dependence
Timetables
Travel time
Windows (intervals)
Working hours
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Summary:This paper presents a real-world optimization problem in home health care that is solved on a daily basis. It can be described as follows: care staff members with different qualification levels have to visit certain clients at least once per day. Assignment constraints and hard time windows at the clients have to be observed. The staff members have a maximum working time and their workday can be separated into two shifts. A mandatory break that can also be partitioned needs to be scheduled if the consecutive working time exceeds a certain threshold. The objective is to minimize the total travel- and waiting times of the care staff. Additionally, factors influencing the satisfaction of the clients or the care staff are considered. Most of the care staff members from the Austrian Red Cross (ARC) in Vienna use a combination of public transport modes (bus, tram, train, and metro) and walking. We present a novel model formulation for this problem, followed by an efficient exact solution approach to compute the time-dependent travel times out of the timetables from public transport service providers on a minute-basis. These travel time matrices are then used as input for three Tabu Search based solution methods for the scheduling problem. Extensive numerical studies with real-world data from the ARC show that the current planning can be improved significantly when these methods are applied.
ISSN:1936-6582
1936-6590
DOI:10.1007/s10696-015-9227-1