HHC-PSS: Solving the problem of home health care with a resource constrained project scheduling approach

Subject Areas : Statistics

Hamid Reza Yousefzade ¹ ( Department of Mathematics, Payame Noor University (PNU), Iran )

Received: 2019-11-23 Accepted : 2020-02-11 Published : 2021-05-22

Keywords: خدمات مراقبتی-درمانی در منزل, زمان‌بندی پروژه با منابع محدود, قاعده اولویت, شیوه زمان‌بندی,

Abstract :

In home health care (HHC) problem, the assignment of medical teams to patients and scheduling medical members are done manually, which is a time-consuming process and sometimes are not optimized. In this article, we examine the scheduling assignment of medical teams to the patients with a new innovative approach based on resource constrained project scheduling problem. Advantages of proposed approach can be included the use of theorems, standard benchmark problems, and various (meta-innovative) scheduling methods to improve assignment quality, as well as determining the minimum number of human resources required to cover all medical services requested by patients. In this approach, we solve the HHC problem by defining a dynamic priority rule and using the parallel scheduling scheme. Evaluation criteria for evaluating the quality of feasible solutions resulting from scheduling include minimizing the travel time of medical team members, reducing overtimes, maximizing the number of human resources which are used, and so on. The set of feasible solutions satisfy to some constraints such as the total working time in the contracts, the hardware time window of each job, the mandatory breaking time, and the optimal assignment of the medical team to patients (according to the type of service requested by the patient). The numerical results obtained from calling the proposed algorithm on the Kolisch’s benchmarks are presented to evaluate the performance of proposed approach. Based on the results, the proposed algorithm has a high ability to solve the HHC problem.

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