Solving the Palliative Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem with an integer linear programming model

Efficient routing and scheduling are critical for providing patients with quality health care in their homes, and palliative care involves specific requirements. This paper addresses the Palliative Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (PHHCRSP) through an integrated mathematical model. Key considerations include caregiver skills, care continuity, and a multi-period planning horizon. Special attention is also given to the case of clustered patients. Five formulations with different objective functions are analyzed and solutions reveal that optimizing only for minimum or maximum workload leads to non-efficient routing. The formulation that balances the total workload and the minimum workload emerges as the most effective, as it manages to obtain good routes while distributing the workload evenly among the caregivers. The results of the computational study on a set of well-known benchmark instances show that it is possible to obtain good patient care while keeping good working conditions for the caregivers.