Home Health Care Scheduling and Routing with Temporal Dependencies and Continuity of Care

Due to facing an acute shortage of beds in hospitals, the danger of getting involved in hospital infections and high-cost hospitals care, the Home Health Care industry has encountered high demands in recent years. Different stakeholders with various interests are involved in home health care that makes the process of planning and scheduling of nurses, who offered services, challenging. This paper, therefore, focuses on scheduling and routing nurses traveled to the patient’s home by considering the main features of the problem such as Continuity of Care and temporal dependencies. A new formulation for adjusting the time distance between two consecutive jobs performed by a nurse is presented. A feasible solution has to consider nurse and patient’s preferences, time windows for jobs, nurse’s qualification, and waiting time. A genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. The computational results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, especially for large-size instances. Finally, the effect of the nurse’s dispatching policy on the objective function, waiting, and traveling times is examined.