Abstract
In this paper, we study optimal partitioning of home health care (HHC) units among different subregions of a city. Given each HHC crew is in charge of patients in a single subregion, the problem aims to group locations (districts) where patients live in larger subregions such that the total workloads of HHC crews are balanced. Moreover, due to geographical reasons, some locations cannot be assigned to the same subregion, which gives rise to feasible assignment problem of locations. First, we tackle the complexity of these problems and show that the feasible assignment problem is NP-complete. Then we propose a new objective function for the HHC workload balancing problem and develop a heuristic method to deal with the NP-hardness of the optimal partitioning problem. Compared to a mixed-integer linear model from the literature, the heuristic quickly finds an optimal solution in most of the problem instances and gives efficient and competitive results for instances which are not optimally solved.
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Ozturk, O., Begen, M.A., Zaric, G.S. (2022). Home Health Care Services Management: Districting Problem Revisited. In: Calisir, F. (eds) Industrial Engineering in the Internet-of-Things World. GJCIE 2020. Lecture Notes in Management and Industrial Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76724-2_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76724-2_30
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