Solving a home-care districting problem in an urban setting

Abstract

This article describes a districting study undertaken for the Côte-des-Neiges local community health clinic in Montreal. A territory must be partitioned into six districts by suitably grouping territorial basic units. Five districting criteria must be respected: indivisibility of basic units, respect for borough boundaries, connectivity, visiting personnel mobility, and workload equilibrium. The last two criteria are combined into a single objective function and the problem is solved by means of a tabu search technique that iteratively moves a basic unit to an adjacent district or swaps two basic units between adjacent districts. The problem was solved and the clinic management confirmed its satisfaction after a 2 year implementation period.

Keywords:

• districting
• community health clinic
• multi-criteria optimization
• tabu search

Acknowledgements

This research was partly supported by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under Grants OGP0184219 and OGP0039682, by the Quebec FCAR program and by the Côte-des-Neiges CLSC. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Côte-des-Neiges CLSC for their support and to ESRI Canada for their complimentary provision of ArcView. Finally, we thank the referees for their valuable comments.