IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/hcarem/v23y2020i4d10.1007_s10729-020-09509-1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A heuristic approach to the task planning problem in a home care business

Author

Listed:
  • Isabel Méndez-Fernández

    (University of A Coruña)

  • Silvia Lorenzo-Freire

    (University of A Coruña)

  • Ignacio García-Jurado

    (University of A Coruña)

  • Julián Costa

    (University of A Coruña)

  • Luisa Carpente

    (University of A Coruña)

Abstract

In this paper, we study a task scheduling problem in a home care business. The company has a set of supervisors in charge of scheduling the caregivers’ weekly plans. This can be a time-consuming task due to the large number of services they work with, as well as the need to consider user preferences, services required time windows and travel times between users’ homes. Apart from that, it is also important to have a continuity of care, i.e., that users generally prefer not to have their caregiver changed. This problem involves both route planning and employee task planning, which are usually very challenging. We first propose to model it using integer linear programming methodology. Since the real instances that the company needs to solve are very large, we design a heuristic algorithm, based on the simulated annealing philosophy, that allows the company to obtain the caregivers’ weekly schedules. Lastly, we check the algorithm’s good performance, by comparing the solutions it proposes with those provided by the integer linear programming methodology, in small size problems, and we present a case study to confirm that the algorithm correctly solves real-life instances.

Suggested Citation

  • Isabel Méndez-Fernández & Silvia Lorenzo-Freire & Ignacio García-Jurado & Julián Costa & Luisa Carpente, 2020. "A heuristic approach to the task planning problem in a home care business," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 23(4), pages 556-570, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:hcarem:v:23:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s10729-020-09509-1
    DOI: 10.1007/s10729-020-09509-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10729-020-09509-1
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10729-020-09509-1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Maya Duque, P.A. & Castro, M. & Sörensen, K. & Goos, P., 2015. "Home care service planning. The case of Landelijke Thuiszorg," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 243(1), pages 292-301.
    2. Rasmussen, Matias Sevel & Justesen, Tor & Dohn, Anders & Larsen, Jesper, 2012. "The Home Care Crew Scheduling Problem: Preference-based visit clustering and temporal dependencies," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 219(3), pages 598-610.
    3. Klaus-Dieter Rest & Patrick Hirsch, 2016. "Daily scheduling of home health care services using time-dependent public transport," Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, Springer, vol. 28(3), pages 495-525, September.
    4. Carello, Giuliana & Lanzarone, Ettore, 2014. "A cardinality-constrained robust model for the assignment problem in Home Care services," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 236(2), pages 748-762.
    5. Nickel, Stefan & Schröder, Michael & Steeg, Jörg, 2012. "Mid-term and short-term planning support for home health care services," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 219(3), pages 574-587.
    6. Braekers, Kris & Hartl, Richard F. & Parragh, Sophie N. & Tricoire, Fabien, 2016. "A bi-objective home care scheduling problem: Analyzing the trade-off between costs and client inconvenience," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 248(2), pages 428-443.
    7. Eveborn, Patrik & Flisberg, Patrik & Ronnqvist, Mikael, 2006. "Laps Care--an operational system for staff planning of home care," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 171(3), pages 962-976, June.
    8. Paraskevopoulos, Dimitris C. & Laporte, Gilbert & Repoussis, Panagiotis P. & Tarantilis, Christos D., 2017. "Resource constrained routing and scheduling: Review and research prospects," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 263(3), pages 737-754.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Moosavi, Amirhossein & Ozturk, Onur & Patrick, Jonathan, 2022. "Staff scheduling for residential care under pandemic conditions: The case of COVID-19," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 112(C).
    2. Ignacio A. Sepúlveda & Maichel M. Aguayo & Rodrigo De la Fuente & Guillermo Latorre-Núñez & Carlos Obreque & Camila Vásquez Orrego, 2024. "Scheduling mobile dental clinics: A heuristic approach considering fairness among school districts," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 27(1), pages 46-71, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nasir, Jamal Abdul & Kuo, Yong-Hong, 2024. "Stochastic home care transportation with dynamically prioritized patients: An integrated facility location, fleet sizing, and routing approach," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 184(C).
    2. Pahlevani, Delaram & Abbasi, Babak & Hearne, John W. & Eberhard, Andrew, 2022. "A cluster-based algorithm for home health care planning: A case study in Australia," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 166(C).
    3. Mohamed Cissé & Semih Yalçindag & Yannick Kergosien & Evren Sahin & Christophe Lenté & Andrea Matta, 2017. "OR problems related to Home Health Care: A review of relevant routing and scheduling problems," Post-Print hal-01736714, HAL.
    4. Gang Du & Xi Liang & Chuanwang Sun, 2017. "Scheduling Optimization of Home Health Care Service Considering Patients’ Priorities and Time Windows," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(2), pages 1-22, February.
    5. Naderi, Bahman & Begen, Mehmet A. & Zaric, Gregory S. & Roshanaei, Vahid, 2023. "A novel and efficient exact technique for integrated staffing, assignment, routing, and scheduling of home care services under uncertainty," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    6. Paola Cappanera & Maria Grazia Scutellà, 2022. "Addressing consistency and demand uncertainty in the Home Care planning problem," Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, Springer, vol. 34(1), pages 1-39, March.
    7. de Aguiar, Ana Raquel Pena & Ramos, Tânia Rodrigues Pereira & Gomes, Maria Isabel, 2023. "Home care routing and scheduling problem with teams’ synchronization," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    8. Jalel Euchi & Malek Masmoudi & Patrick Siarry, 2022. "Home health care routing and scheduling problems: a literature review," 4OR, Springer, vol. 20(3), pages 351-389, September.
    9. Gomes, Maria Isabel & Ramos, Tânia Rodrigues Pereira, 2019. "Modelling and (re-)planning periodic home social care services with loyalty and non-loyalty features," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 277(1), pages 284-299.
    10. Gang Du & Luyao Zheng & Xiaoling Ouyang, 2019. "Real-time scheduling optimization considering the unexpected events in home health care," Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, vol. 37(1), pages 196-220, January.
    11. Lin, Meiyan & Ma, Lijun & Ying, Chengshuo, 2021. "Matching daily home health-care demands with supply in service-sharing platforms," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).
    12. Yadav, Niteesh & Tanksale, Ajinkya, 2022. "An integrated routing and scheduling problem for home healthcare delivery with limited person-to-person contact," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 303(3), pages 1100-1125.
    13. Makboul, Salma & Kharraja, Said & Abbassi, Abderrahman & El Hilali Alaoui, Ahmed, 2024. "A multiobjective approach for weekly Green Home Health Care routing and scheduling problem with care continuity and synchronized services," Operations Research Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 12(C).
    14. Neda Tanoumand & Tonguç Ünlüyurt, 2021. "An exact algorithm for the resource constrained home health care vehicle routing problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 304(1), pages 397-425, September.
    15. Grenouilleau, Florian & Legrain, Antoine & Lahrichi, Nadia & Rousseau, Louis-Martin, 2019. "A set partitioning heuristic for the home health care routing and scheduling problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 275(1), pages 295-303.
    16. Sacramento Quintanilla & Francisco Ballestín & Ángeles Pérez, 2020. "Mathematical models to improve the current practice in a Home Healthcare Unit," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 42(1), pages 43-74, March.
    17. Braekers, Kris & Hartl, Richard F. & Parragh, Sophie N. & Tricoire, Fabien, 2016. "A bi-objective home care scheduling problem: Analyzing the trade-off between costs and client inconvenience," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 248(2), pages 428-443.
    18. Amir M. Fathollahi-Fard & Abbas Ahmadi & Behrooz Karimi, 2021. "Multi-Objective Optimization of Home Healthcare with Working-Time Balancing and Care Continuity," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(22), pages 1-33, November.
    19. Restrepo, María I. & Rousseau, Louis-Martin & Vallée, Jonathan, 2020. "Home healthcare integrated staffing and scheduling," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).
    20. Jamal Abdul Nasir & Chuangyin Dang, 2018. "Solving a More Flexible Home Health Care Scheduling and Routing Problem with Joint Patient and Nursing Staff Selection," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(1), pages 1-22, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:hcarem:v:23:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s10729-020-09509-1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.