Home Health Care Scheduling Problem Under Uncertainty: Robust Optimization Approaches

Abstract

This paper deals with the home health care service (HHCS) which is defined as a set of medical, paramedical and social services delivered to patients in their domicile rather than in hospital. To support decision making in HHC, optimization models have been used. However, several of those models are deterministic and do not address the dynamical and uncertainty aspects of the system and variability of some patient data. The HHC scheduling problems are facing more and more complex and specific constraints. These constraints have to be respected, meanwhile the problem objective is optimized under parameters uncertainties. This paper aims to formulate a model that integrated home care scheduling problem while taking into account human aspect -- the behavior of patients, and also another aspect like travel time uncertainty and dynamic behavior of involved medical team and social actors in HHC. Robust approaches are adopted to model and handle this uncertainty.