Home Health Care Services Management: Districting Problem Revisited


Ozturk O., Begen M. A., Zaric G. S.

Global Joint Conference on Industrial Engineering and Its Application Areas (GJCIE), ELECTR NETWORK, 14 - 15 Ağustos 2020, ss.407-421 identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1007/978-3-030-76724-2_30
  • Basıldığı Ülke: ELECTR NETWORK
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.407-421
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Home health care services, Districting problem, Complexity analysis, Mathematical modeling, Heuristic, SCHEDULING PROBLEM, ROUTING PROBLEM
  • İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

In this paper, we study optimal partitioning of home health care (HHC) units among different subregions of a city. Given each HHC crew is in charge of patients in a single subregion, the problem aims to group locations (districts) where patients live in larger subregions such that the total workloads of HHC crews are balanced. Moreover, due to geographical reasons, some locations cannot be assigned to the same subregion, which gives rise to feasible assignment problem of locations. First, we tackle the complexity of these problems and show that the feasible assignment problem is NP-complete. Then we propose a new objective function for the HHC workload balancing problem and develop a heuristic method to deal with the NP-hardness of the optimal partitioning problem. Compared to a mixed-integer linear model from the literature, the heuristic quickly finds an optimal solution in most of the problem instances and gives efficient and competitive results for instances which are not optimally solved.