Mathematical Model for the Home Health Care Scheduling and Routing Problem with Flexible Lunch Break Requirements

This paper formulates a mixed integer linear programming model of a home health care scheduling and routing problem with daily planning horizon. The entire procedure involves dispatching caregivers to serve visits demanded by patients at their homes with the objective function aims at minimizing the total operating cost. In some cases, based on the needs of patients, several caregivers should be synchronized and allocated to one patient under a given time window. The proposed model also accounts for multiple constraints such as the restricted working duration, the qualification and preference of patients, and innovative flexible lunch break requirements. Finally, the problem is solved to optimality by Gurobi, a commercial program solver. Numerical results shown that the solution performs quite well compared to the previous artificial planning collected in the Institute Monteclair, shows the the problems can be solved efficiently for optimal solutions. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.