Multi-objective optimization for home health care planning considering multiple stakeholders’ needs

Home health care services, which allow patients to receive medical care in the comfort of their own homes, have experienced an increase in popularity. We present a multi-objective optimization model that considers the needs of three primary stakeholders: company managers, caregivers, and patients. The model tackles the weekly routing and scheduling problems through a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming approach. Continuity of care is emphasized given its distinguishing factor from daily care. Both salaried caregivers and self-employed caregivers are considered. Due to the model’s computational complexity, we develop an ϵ-greedy large neighborhood search within an improved multi-directional local search framework. The effectiveness of the model and method is validated using real-world data, demonstrating that our algorithm surpasses the performance of the enhanced ε-constraint method.