Disruption Management for the Real-Time Home Caregiver Scheduling and Routing Problem

Abstract

The aggravating trend of the aging population, the miniaturization of the family structure, and the increase of families with empty nesters greatly affect the sustainable development of the national economy and social old-age security system of China. The emergence of home health care or home care (HHC/HC) service mode provides an alternative for elderly care. How to develop and apply this new mobile service mode is crucial for the government. Therefore, the pertinent optimization problems regarding HHC/HC have constantly attracted the attention of researchers. Unexpected events, such as new requests of customers, cancellations of customers’ services, and changes of customers’ time windows, may occur during the process of executing an a priori visiting plan. These events may sometimes make the original plan non-optimal or even infeasible. To cope with this situation, we introduce disruption management to the real-time home caregiver scheduling and routing problem. The deviation measurements on customers, caregivers, and companies are first defined. A mathematical model that minimizes the weighted sum of deviation measurements is then constructed. Next, a tabu search (TS) heuristic is developed to efficiently solve the problem, and a cost recorded mechanism is used to strengthen the performance. Finally, by performing computational experiments on three real-life instances, the effectiveness of the TS heuristic is tested, and the advantages of disruption management are analyzed.