Home healthcare routing and scheduling problem under uncertainty considering patients' preferences and service desirability

Home Health Care (HHC) is characterized as preparing medical and paramedical services for patients at their place of residence. In the HHC industry, it is imperative for decision-makers to appoint nurses to patients and plan visiting patterns to confront with conflicting objectives and boost service quality. This study offers important insights into Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP) by dealing with three patient-oriented objectives. Moreover, the proposed model accounts for real-life constraints such as emergency patients, nurses’ proficiency and patients’ preferences. Owing to the multi-objective nature of the model, the Augmented Epsilon Constraint approach and Fuzzy Goal Programming are used for trading off the objectives. Further, getting as close as possible to the real-world problems, some parameters are considered uncertain and consequently a robust approach along with three dissimilar uncertainty sets are used to control uncertainty. Numerical results demonstrate that, regardless of the type of the uncertainty set, increasing control parameters make objective values farther than ideal ones, and the comparison performed among the sets also highlights the stringency of the Box space. A unique indicator, presented to validate the robust approaches, features all sets are almost the same in terms of equal optimality and feasibility criteria.