Heuristic algorithm for nurse assignment and visit scheduling in a home healthcare system

Abstract

This thesis focuses on an operational scheduling problem in a home healthcare system in which nurses visit patients regularly for relatively minor healthcare services. Intervals between the visits may differ for different patients and each patient must be assigned to only one nurse. On each day in the planning horizon (24 working days), nurses must visit the patients assigned to them on that day, and then return to the hospital. For the problem with the objective of minimizing total travelling distances of the nurses over the planning horizon, we develop a two-phase heuristic algorithm, in which nurses are assigned to the patients and then the visiting schedules of the nurses are determined. To evaluate performance of the proposed algorithm, we perform computational experiments on a number of problem instances that are randomly generated. Results of the tests show that the proposed algorithm gives near optimal solutions in a reasonable time.