A Column Generation Approach to Home Care Staff Routing and Scheduling

Abstract

Daily route generation of home care staff is considered and a column generation heuristic is developed. Constraints considered include staff working hours, time window for each visit, means of transportation (bicycle/car), maximum allowable idle time between visits, patient/staff compatibility, among others. Since it is desired to generate compact routes in the geographically scattered area, the minimization of total travel time is used. Computational results based on real data will be presented. To further reduce CPU time, pre-processing of input data is performed to reduce the solution space by narrowing the time window of visits and by limiting candidate staff members who could be assigned to a specific visit. The pre-processing is performed by solving two small 0–1 programs. It is shown how the pre-processing cuts down the CPU time of the column generation algorithm.