Paper Info
Title
Mathematical Model And Exact Algorithm For The Home Care Worker Scheduling And Routing Problem With Lunch Break Requirements
Abstract
Home health care or home care (HHC/HC) refers to the delivery of social, medical and paramedical services to clients in their own homes. Each day, care workers start from the HHC/HC centre, visit some clients and return to the centre. During the service delivery process, there is usually a lunch break for each worker. In this paper, we address a real-life home care worker scheduling and routing problem with the consideration of lunch break requirements. A three-index mathematical model is constructed for the problem. The problem is decomposed into a master problem and several pricing sub-problems, and is optimally solved by a branch-and-price (B&P) algorithm. Specifically, a sophisticated label-correcting algorithm is designed to address lunch break constraints in pricing sub-problems; some cutting-edge acceleration strategies are applied during the column generation process. Experimental results show that the proposed B&P algorithm is able to produce satisfied solutions within an acceptable runtime and outperforms the mixed integer programming solver CPLEX.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1080/00207543.2016.1213917
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
Keywords
DocType
Volume
healthcare logistics, scheduling, transportation, lunch break, branch-and-price
Journal
55
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
0020-7543
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ran Liu1417.64
Biao Yuan2143.58
Z. B. Jiang324236.08