Re-planning In Home Healthcare: A Decomposition Approach To Minimize Idle Times For Workers While Ensuring Continuity Of Care
Résumé
Scheduling and routing careworkers is a perpetual challenge in the home health care (HHC)industry: it is essential to ensure a good quality of care under reasonable expenses. HHC consistsin providing care to fragile people, therefore the pool of patients often changes: the schedulemust be computed again, but continuity of care must be preserved to keep the patients satisfied.The working environment in the HHC field is remarkably stressful so it causes a high turnoverrate in the staff, and has a strong impact on service quality. It is essential to provide schedulesthat satisty both patients and careworkers. In this paper, we address a weekly careworker replanningproblem with continuity constraints. A decomposition approach is proposed to offera careworker-friendly solution: First a path-generation algorithm creates admissible tours, andthen a set partitioning model selects the tours.