A hybrid setup for a hybrid scenario: combining heuristics for the home health care problem

A hybrid setup for a hybrid scenario: combining heuristics for the home health care problem

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Article ID: iaor20072386
Country: United Kingdom
Volume: 33
Issue: 10
Start Page Number: 2866
End Page Number: 2890
Publication Date: Oct 2006
Journal: Computers and Operations Research
Authors: ,
Keywords: personnel & manpower planning, vehicle routing & scheduling, heuristics, programming: integer, programming: constraints
Abstract:

Home health care, i.e. visiting and nursing patients in their homes, is a growing sector in the medical service business. From a staff rostering point of view, the problem is to find a feasible working plan for all nurses that has to respect a variety of hard and soft constraints, and preferences. Additionally, home health care problems contain a routing component: a nurse must be able to visit her patients in a given roster using a car or public transport. It is desired to design rosters that consider both the staff rostering and vehicle routing components while minimizing transportation costs and maximizing satisfaction of patients and nurses. In this paper we present the core optimization components of the PARPAP software. In the optimization kernel, a combination of linear programming, constraint programming, and (meta-)heuristics for the home health care problem is used, and we show how to apply these different heuristics efficiently to solve home health care problems. The overall concept is able to adapt to various changes in the constraint structure, thus providing the flexibility needed in a generic tool for real-world settings.

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