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Real-time scheduling optimization considering the unexpected events in home health care

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Abstract

Home health care, a new kind of health services that can be given in home for special populations (elderly, disabled, youth, etc.), is usually less expensive, more convenient and more efficient. Based on the face-to-face (in-person) interviews, we find that scheduling arrangements of home health care are often affected by some unexpected events such as cancellation of services, demand for emergency care and medical device failures. These events may lead to medical scheduling conflicts and therefore might decrease patient satisfaction due to the delayed service. Considering the emergencies in the home health care, this study takes the home health care mode under the unexpected events as the research object and focuses on the time window constraints involved in the real-time scheduling problem. In order to obtain an optimal medical dispatch program and ensure patients’ golden period for treatment, we establish an effective real-time scheduling model to minimize the total required time of scheduling, and propose an improved memetic algorithm to optimize the model. Empirical analysis was then adopted to verify the rationality of the model. Finally, we analyze the practical effect of dispatching decision and put forward the recommendations for future research directions.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Funding Nos. 71472065, 71772065), Social Sciences Research supported by Ministry of Education of China (Funding Nos. 14YJC630026, 16YJC790078), Key projects of Shanghai soft science Research Program (17692107000), Social Sciences Research supported by Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (Funding No. 2016EJB003),Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2017ECNU-HWFW035) and Shanghai Pujiang Program (14PJC027).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business and Administration, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Gang Du & Luyao Zheng

  2. Department of Economics, School of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Xiaoling Ouyang

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  1. Gang Du
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  2. Luyao Zheng
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  3. Xiaoling Ouyang
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Correspondence to Xiaoling Ouyang.

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Du, G., Zheng, L. & Ouyang, X. Real-time scheduling optimization considering the unexpected events in home health care. J Comb Optim 37, 196–220 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-017-0220-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-017-0220-3

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