The home health care routing and scheduling problem with interdependent services

This paper presents a model for the daily planning of health care services carried out at patients’ homes by staff members of a home care company. The planning takes into account individual service requirements of the patients, individual qualifications of the staff and possible interdependencies between different service operations. Interdependencies of services can include, for example, a temporal separation of two services as is required if drugs have to be administered a certain time before providing a meal. Other services like handling a disabled patient may require two staff members working together at a patient’s home. The time preferences of patients are included in terms of given time windows. In this paper, we propose a planning approach for the described problem, which can be used for optimizing economical and service oriented measures of performance. A mathematical model formulation is proposed together with a powerful heuristic based on a sophisticated solution representation.