Home healthcare routing and scheduling problem under uncertainty considering patients' preferences and service desirability

Abstract

Home Health Care (HHC) is the task of preparing medical and paramedical services for patients at their place of residence. In the HHC industry, it is imperative for decision-makers to appoint nurses to service patients and plan visiting patterns to confront with conflicting objectives and boost service quality. This study provides significant insights into Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP) by pursuing three patient-oriented objectives. The proposed model accounts for real-life constraints such as emergency patients, nurses' proficiency, and patients' preferences. Owing to the multiobjective nature of the model, both Augmented Epsilon Constraint (AEC) and Fuzzy Goal Programming (FGP) approaches are employed to accomplish the mentioned objectives. Further, getting as close as possible to the real-world problems, some parameters are considered uncertain. In this regard, a robust approach along with three dissimilar uncertainty sets is used to control uncertainty. The numerical results indicate that regardless of the type of the uncertainty set, increasing the control parameters would make the objective values farther than ideal, and the comparison made among the sets confirmed the stringency of the Box space. A unique indicator was also presented to validate the viability of the robust approaches according to which the features of all sets were almost the same in terms of equal optimality and feasibility criteria.