Mathematical programming models for home healthcare service optimisation

In this paper, we address the home healthcare services problem in terms of routing and scheduling. The aim of the study is to determine a feasible working plan for nurses in order to offer patients the best possible solution in terms of quality of service and economy while satisfying the demands of patients and nurses as well as the related constraints. Besides giving a brief overview of related literature, we describe a new extended version of the existing home healthcare service problems and propose two mixed integer linear programming formulations. Computational results conducted based on a set of randomly generated home healthcare scenarios reveal that the proposed model based on Big-M method is more flexible and applicable in practice when compared to another model based on arc timing method.