A flexible mathematical model for home health care problems
A flexible mathematical model for home health care problems
In the health and social care sectors it is common for some specialized teams to travel to patients homes to provide care. These teams are typically made up of by a number of staff members with varying skills, starting locations and working hours. Patients require different types of care, during specific time windows, and may have special requirements, such as needing two staff members, or multiple visits with some sort of temporal dependency between them. Since teams need to decide which staff member will visit each patient, as well as the routes they will take to do so, this kind of planning problem is known in the literature as the Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP). We introduce a new mixed integer linear programming formulation for the HHCRSP that extends previous models. Our formulation can readily be adapted to address more specific variants in the scientific literature, proving a larger number of optimal solutions and stronger lower bounds on benchmark instances using the same computational framework. We further propose an instance generator for producing scenarios that closely resemble those of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom.
Home Health Care, Logistics, Routing, Scheduling
Reula Martín, Miguel
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Parreño-Torres, Consuelo
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Lamas-Fernandez, Carlos
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Martinez, Antonio
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Reula Martín, Miguel
9cf9ab1c-7c6f-414a-a38f-240f2f83c69c
Parreño-Torres, Consuelo
77d1af44-b895-4bdd-ad32-6f26da6d0668
Lamas-Fernandez, Carlos
e96b5deb-74d5-4c9b-a0ce-448c99526b09
Martinez, Antonio
2f9989e1-7860-4163-996c-b1e6f21d5bed
Reula Martín, Miguel, Parreño-Torres, Consuelo, Lamas-Fernandez, Carlos and Martinez, Antonio
(2025)
A flexible mathematical model for home health care problems.
European Journal of Operational Research.
(doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2025.05.055).
Abstract
In the health and social care sectors it is common for some specialized teams to travel to patients homes to provide care. These teams are typically made up of by a number of staff members with varying skills, starting locations and working hours. Patients require different types of care, during specific time windows, and may have special requirements, such as needing two staff members, or multiple visits with some sort of temporal dependency between them. Since teams need to decide which staff member will visit each patient, as well as the routes they will take to do so, this kind of planning problem is known in the literature as the Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP). We introduce a new mixed integer linear programming formulation for the HHCRSP that extends previous models. Our formulation can readily be adapted to address more specific variants in the scientific literature, proving a larger number of optimal solutions and stronger lower bounds on benchmark instances using the same computational framework. We further propose an instance generator for producing scenarios that closely resemble those of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom.
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Accepted/In Press date: 29 May 2025
e-pub ahead of print date: 13 June 2025
Keywords:
Home Health Care, Logistics, Routing, Scheduling
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 502618
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/502618
ISSN: 0377-2217
PURE UUID: 80fc0970-b948-43e4-a2d1-7f878afa5797
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Date deposited: 02 Jul 2025 12:48
Last modified: 11 Sep 2025 03:03
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Contributors
Author:
Miguel Reula Martín
Author:
Consuelo Parreño-Torres
Author:
Carlos Lamas-Fernandez
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