Balancing the satisfaction of stakeholders in home health care coordination: a novel OptaPlanner CSP model

ABSTRACT

Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP) has been widely investigated in operations research. In this paper, a model based on the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) is proposed, which is able to deal with daily HHCRSPs. Human factors are considered in our formulation of the problem and we seek a balance between the different stakeholders’ satisfaction criteria. The considered temporal constraints are soft and controlled by the stakeholders’ personalised tolerance and satisfaction rates. We will explain how this new Satisfaction-Oriented HHCRSP (SOH2CRSP) model is built and solved by using an open-source solver: the OptaPlanner. In order to examine the impact of human factors, a study will estimate the added value provided when satisfaction is considered in the problem formulation. The comparison is based on a use case derived from the dataset of an existing HHC organisation. The numerical results will show the benefits of our approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem
• Constraint Satisfaction Problem and soft or
• OptaPlanner

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. A list of patients assigned to each care team in the practice.

2. Drools: https://www.drools.org/.