Managing Random Events in the Home Healthcare Scheduling and Routing Problem

Abstract

This paper tackles the random events that appear during the daily planning of home health care staffing and routing such as uncertain travel times, unexpected caregivers' absence, and cancellation or addition of new visit requests. We present a multi-stage approach to incorporate these stochastic elements into the planning process, employing proactive and reactive strategies. Initially, with a baseline solution previously generated, comprising a one-month schedule for caregivers, a stochastic and periodic routing problem is solved thanks to a Simheuristic. In parallel, a proactive strategy based on linear programming assigns backup caregivers to each shift in the planning horizon to mitigate the impact of unforeseen absences. Finally, to manage visit cancellations or new additions, the established routes are dynamically adjusted to minimize the total travel time ensuring adherence to the time window constraints. The proposed approach was tested on real-world instances from a hospital setting, showing that the approach outperforms the current solution methods.

Keywords: Home healthcare, Mixed-integer programming, Proactive and reactive strategies, Scheduling, Simheuristic, Stochastic routing.