Home health care routing and scheduling problem with the consideration of outpatient services

Abstract

In China, family doctor contract service can provide not only the home health care service for the elderly or patients with mobility difficulties at their homes but also the outpatient service mainly for ordinary patients in the community care center. This paper presents a home health care routing and scheduling problem with the consideration of outpatient services. By considering the constraints about time windows, skill requirements, and working regulations, the problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear and convex programming model to minimize the total travel costs of the door-to-door service and the total waiting penalties of out-patients, and maximize the total benefit of patients’ preference satisfaction. We adopt an outer-approximation method to obtain its global ε-optimal solutions for the small scale problem and develop a hybrid genetic algorithm to solve the large problem. A small instance is set up to analyze the problem properties and the performance of the outer-approximation method. The results of large scale examples show that the proposed hybrid genetic algorithm can provide high-quality solutions with short computing times.