A new optimization approach for a home health care problem

This paper deals with the home health care services. The home health care services are defined as a set of medical, paramedical and social services delivered to patients in their domicile rather than in hospital. In this paper, a new Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is proposed to make a planning for a home health care problem. The model is optimizing routes and rosters for the health care staffs, while problem specific constraints are satisfied. This model integrates an original concept related to the human behavior (e.g. patient behavior). The MILP model is solved using the commercial optimization software Ilog-Cplex of IBM. Computational results on several benchmarks, generated from a real living-lab (GIS MADONAH) in Bourges (France), proved that the proposed model can solve real large-sized problems within acceptable computational time.