Scheduling Optimization of the Home Health Care Problem with Stochastic Travel and Care Times

Home Health Care (HHC) is a wide range of health care services provided in patients' homes in case of illness, aging or injury. Each caregiver has to visit assigned patients while respecting the schedule given by the decision maker. Deterministic models ignore the uncertainty that could happen, which will cause to not respect the schedule fixed by the decision maker and tardiness of services operations could be occurred at patients. In this work, a stochastic programming with recourse (SPR) model is proposed to deal with the Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP) with stochastic travel and care times. The objective is to minimize caregivers' transportation cost and the expected value of recourse caused by patients' delayed services and caregivers' overtime. Monte Carlo simulation is used to estimate the expected value of recourse. The deterministic model is solved by the CPLEX solver and the Genetic Algorithm (GA) based heuristic, which is implemented using the C++ language. Computational results demonstrate the performance of the GA and show the complexity of the SPR model in terms of CPU running times.