Decision Support Systems for Scheduling and Routing Problems in a Home Care Business

Abstract

Home care services aim to help elderly, sick or dependent people in maintain their quality of life without having to leave their homes. This type of problem is denoted as Home Care Scheduling Problem (HCSP) and the goal is to obtain the routes that the company’s caregivers must follow, as well as the timeframe in which each service should be carried out. That is, a HCSP can be seen as a routing and scheduling problem. This thesis studies a real HCSP presented by a company called Mayores. First, the original problem proposed by the company is presented, which consists in updating the weekly schedules of the caregivers in order to solve a set of possible incidents. This problem is tackled using the Simulated Annealing method embedded inside a custom heuristic algorithm. Second, a more general version of the problem is described, which aims to obtain the best possible schedules of the caregivers from scratch, considering two objectives: the welfare of the users and the cost of the schedule. The problem is solved considering three approaches: two hierarchical ones (prioritizing the welfare or prioritizing the cost) and a biobjective one. Finally, a computational study is presented in order to evaluate the resolution approaches, using instances from the literature and real data from the company