Title
Decomposition techniques with mixed integer programming and heuristics for home healthcare planning.
Abstract
We tackle home healthcare planning scenarios in the UK using decomposition methods that incorporate mixed integer programming solvers and heuristics. Home healthcare planning is a difficult problem that integrates aspects from scheduling and routing. Solving real-world size instances of these problems still presents a significant challenge to modern exact optimization solvers. Nevertheless, we propose decomposition techniques to harness the power of such solvers while still offering a practical approach to produce high-quality solutions to real-world problem instances. We first decompose the problem into several smaller sub-problems. Next, mixed integer programming and/or heuristics are used to tackle the sub-problems. Finally, the sub-problem solutions are combined into a single valid solution for the whole problem. The different decomposition methods differ in the way in which sub-problems are generated and the way in which conflicting assignments are tackled (i.e. avoided or repaired). We present the results obtained by the proposed decomposition methods and compare them to solutions obtained with other methods. In addition, we conduct a study that reveals how the different steps in the proposed method contribute to those results. The main contribution of this paper is a better understanding of effective ways to combine mixed integer programming within effective decomposition methods to solve real-world instances of home healthcare planning problems in practical computation time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s10479-016-2352-8
Annals OR
Keywords
Field
DocType
Heuristic decomposition,Home healthcare planning,Mixed integer programming,Problem decomposition,Workforce scheduling and routing
Mathematical optimization,Scheduling (computing),Computer science,Integer programming,Heuristics,Computation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
256
1
1572-9338
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.37
19
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wasakorn Laesanklang121.39
Dario Landa Silva231628.38