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The home health care problem with working regulations

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Abstract

Due to the geographically dispersed locations of their clients, home health care providers have to perform a complex routing and scheduling task. Besides the well-researched routing problem, the adherence to legal and organizational working regulations is a basis for application in practice. These requirements are already widely incorporated in the nurse rostering problem for stationary institutions, but also have to be considered while generating routes for home care providers. We introduce new and adapted working regulations to the home health care problem. The mixed-integer formulation is adaptable to the requirements of different providers. Our numerical results show that an exact solution approach is noncompetitive with respect to computing time in most cases. We therefore propose a heuristic approach based on an adaptive large neighborhood search to cope with the complexity of the problem. The numerical results are computed on generated but realistic instances as well as on data sets provided in previous publications. The results show that the heuristic achieves good results in comparison to the mixed-integer program in only a portion of the computation time. Additional to a numerical analysis, we investigate the influence of the working regulations on the solutions which indicates the importance of modeling working regulations. If the regulations are neglected, a high number of violations are caused.

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Notes

  1. Available online at http://hhc.guericke.org.

  2. The authors thank Patrick Hirsch and Andrea Trautsamwieser for providing their test instances, their help in understanding the data format and especially Patrick Hirsch for discussing details of the problem setting.

  3. http://www.mono-project.com.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Kevin Tierney for his useful comments on this work and his support using the algorithm configurator GGA and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve this publication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Decision Support and Operations Research Lab, University of Paderborn, Warburger Str. 100, 33098, Paderborn, Germany

    Daniela Guericke & Leena Suhl

  2. International Graduate School of Dynamic Intelligent Systems, University of Paderborn, Warburger Str. 100, 33098, Paderborn, Germany

    Daniela Guericke

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  1. Daniela Guericke
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  2. Leena Suhl
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Correspondence to Daniela Guericke.

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Guericke, D., Suhl, L. The home health care problem with working regulations. OR Spectrum 39, 977–1010 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00291-017-0481-3

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