Multiagent systems to support planning and scheduling in home health care management: A literature review

Abstract

Ensuring sustainable care-giving systems with a focus on human needs and desires is a major challenge. An increasing demand in home health care as well as a limited number of professionals in the labor market have led to a call for efficiency. Thus, managing existing resources has gained relevance. The overall goal is high quality care services, while ensuring economic viability. At the same time, there is a need for modern customer-friendly solutions as well as the consideration of employees’ preferences. To achieve this, adequate methods are needed that take current and future developments into account. Operational management processes in terms of planning and scheduling can be supported by multiagent systems as well as decision support systems using agent-based simulation. The aim of this work is to provide an overview of these solutions in the domain of home health care systems. To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review in which 11 relevant approaches were identified. In addition, these publications were analyzed to identify deficiencies and compared to each other. Because none of the approaches offers a sufficient solution, future work will focus on dynamic distributed scheduling for the control of operational processes which increases efficiency and improves the use of limited resources.