Title
Daily Scheduling Of Caregivers With Stochastic Times
Abstract
This paper addresses a daily caregiver scheduling and routing problem arising in home health care or home care service providers. The problem is quite challenging due to its uncertainties in terms of travel and service times derived from changes in road traffic conditions and customer health status in practice. We first model the problem as a stochastic programme with recourse, where the recourse action is to skip customers without services if the caregiver arrives later than their latest starting service time (i.e. hard time window requirements). Then, we formulate the problem as a set partitioning model and solve it with a branch-and-price (B&P) algorithm. Specifically, we devise an effective discrete approximation method to calculate the arrival time distribution of caregivers, incorporate it into a problem-specific label algorithm, and use a removal-and-insertion-based heuristic and the decremental state-space relaxation technique to accelerate the pricing process. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments on randomly generated instances to validate the effectiveness of the discrete approximation method and the proposed B&P algorithm.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1080/00207543.2018.1445879
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
Keywords
DocType
Volume
health care logistics, routing, scheduling, stochastic times, branch-and-price
Journal
56
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
0020-7543
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
21
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Biao Yuan1143.58
Ran Liu2373.81
Z. B. Jiang324236.08