Operations management applied to home care services: Analysis of the districting problem

摘要

In this paper, we focus on a specific operations management related issue faced by home health care (HHC) services, namely the districting problem. Our contribution consists of formulating the HHC districting problem as a mixed-integer programming model by considering criteria such as the indivisibility of the basic units (i.e. locations where patients live), compactness, workload balance between human resources and compatibility. The formulations developed are based either on balancing the personnel care workload or minimizing the travel distance to reach the patients. Computational results obtained from the models show that they enable to improve the service quality towards HHC patients as well as caregivers by optimizing the compactness and workload balance criteria.