Home care service planning. The case of Landelijke Thuiszorg

Landelijke Thuiszorg is a “social profit” organisation that provides home care services in several Belgian regions. In this paper, the core optimisation component of a decision support system to support the planning of the organisations’ home care service is described. Underlying this decision support system is an optimisation problem that aims to maximise the service level and to minimise the distance travelled by the caregivers of the organisation. This problem is formulated as a bi-objective mathematical program, based on a set partitioning problem formulation. A flexible two-stage solution strategy is designed to efficiently tackle the problem. Computational tests, as well as extensive pilot runs performed by the organisation’s personnel, show that this approach achieves excellent performance, both in terms of the service level and total travelled distance. Moreover, computational times are small, allowing for the weekly planning to be largely automated. The organisation is currently in the process of implementing our solution approach in collaboration with an external software company.