A Three-stage Approach for the Multi-period Green Home Health Care Problem with Varying Speed Constraints

Abstract

International audienceIn this paper, we address an environment-friendly approach to solve the Green Home Health Care (GHHC) routing and assignment problem. The approach aims to reduce fuel consumption to minimize carbon-dioxide emissions. The Home Health Care (HHC) routing and assignment problem is a very complex problem due to the multifactors and criteria that must be taken into consideration during the planning. The main of this work is to find an efficient working plan on a weekly basis, respecting continuity of care, with environmental concern, which ensures the satisfaction of both patients and caregivers and considers most of HHC constraints. The proposed approach is a threestage methodology; the first stage is a multi-objective programming model that minimizes the total traveled distance and fuel consumption with varying speed. In the second stage, we introduce an assignment heuristic, and the third stage is an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model that aims to balance caregivers' workload. The small and medium instances are solved using CPLEX optimizer studio and show that better route planning and minimum fuel consumption is achieved with varying speed concept