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1911. Home healthcare routing and scheduling with task-splitting

Invited abstract in session WA-15: Home Health Care and Operating Room Scheduling, stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).

Wednesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 18 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Loek van Montfort
Operations Analytics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
2. Markus Leitner
Department of Operations Analytics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
3. Wout Dullaert
Operation analytics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Abstract

This study introduces the concept of task-splitting into home healthcare routing and scheduling, focussing on the design of routes and time-tables for caregivers providing services at patients their homes. Task-splitting entails the division of a (long) patient visit into two separate visits, which can be performed by different caregivers at different times. Splitting a visit can increase the planning flexibility of home healthcare (HHC) providers, as the resulting split tasks may have lower requirements related to the caregiver qualifications, relaxed visiting time-windows, or a shorter combined duration. However, the inclusion of task-splitting together with the temporal dependencies that arise between the split parts also presents a computational challenge.
To support the incorporation of task-split decisions into the planning process and explore the impact for HHC providers, we first introduce different mixed integer linear programming formulations. Next to deciding which tasks to split, these formulations are capable of handling various types of synchronisation constraints between the visits. Subsequently, we propose pre-processing routines and heuristic procedures to improve the computational performance of the resulting solution algorithm. Finally, we present results from a computational study that demonstrates the potential benefits of task-splitting, including a reduction on the staff requirements and decrease of operations costs among the instances considered.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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