Workforce scheduling and routing problems: literature survey and computational study

In the context of workforce scheduling, there are many scenarios in which personnel must carry out tasks at different locations hence requiring some form of transportation. Examples of these type of scenarios include nurses visiting patients at home, technicians carrying out repairs at customers’ locations and security guards performing rounds at different premises, etc. We refer to these scenarios as workforce scheduling and routing problems (WSRP) as they usually involve the scheduling of personnel combined with some form of routing in order to ensure that employees arrive on time at the locations where tasks need to be performed. The first part of this paper presents a survey which attempts to identify the common features of WSRP scenarios and the solution methods applied when tackling these problems. The second part of the paper presents a study on the computational difficulty of solving these type of problems. For this, five data sets are gathered from the literature and some adaptations are made in order to incorporate the key features that our survey identifies as commonly arising in WSRP scenarios. The computational study provides an insight into the structure of the adapted test instances, an insight into the effect that problem features have when solving the instances using mathematical programming, and some benchmark computation times using the Gurobi solver running on a standard personal computer

Modelling home care organisations from an operations management perspective

Home Care (HC) service consists of providing care to patients in their homes. During the last decade, the HC service industry experienced significant growth in many European countries. This growth stems from several factors, such as governmental pressure to reduce healthcare costs, demographic changes related to population ageing, social changes, an increase in the number of patients that suffer from chronic illnesses, and the development of new home-based services and technologies. This study proposes a framework that will enable HC service providers to better understand HC operations and their management. The study identifies the main processes and decisions that relate to the field of HC operations management. Hence, an IDEF0 (Integrated Definition for Function Modelling) activity-based model describes the most relevant clinical, logistical and organisational processes associated with HC operations. A hierarchical framework for operations management decisions is also proposed. This analysis is derived from data that was collected by nine HC service providers, which are located in France and Italy, and focuses on the manner in which operations are run, as well as associated constraints, inputs and outputs. The most challenging research areas in the field of HC operations management are also discussed

A CP/LNS Approach for Multi-day Homecare Scheduling Problems

Homecare, i.e., supportive care provided at the patients' homes, is established as a prevalent alternative to unnecessary hospitalization or institutional care (e.g., in a rest home or a nursing home). These activities are provided either by healthcare professional or by non-medical caregivers, depending on the patient's needs (e.g., medical care or just instrumental activities of daily living). In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling Homecare Activities, that is, determining the caregivers' daily tours and the schedules of the homecare service to patients. We present a Constraint Programming (CP) formulation of the problem and we propose a Large Neighborhood Search method built upon the CP formulation

Exploring new operational research opportunities within the Home Care context: the chemotherapy at home

Health service, Home care, Operations planning, Anti-cancer drug supply chain, Scheduling,

Scheduling technicians and tasks in a telecommunications company

This paper proposes a construction heuristic and an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the technician and task scheduling problem arising in a large telecommunications company. This problem was solved within the framework of the 2007 challenge set up by the French Operational Research Society (ROADEF). The paper describes the authors ’ entry in the competition which tied for second place