A review on metaheuristics for solving home health care routing and scheduling problems

Abstract

Nowadays, the healthcare of elderly people catches wide attention since the increase of aging population puts significant pressure on public medical resources. The population aging and scarce care resources are likely to result in a substantial increase in demand for home health care (HHC) services. In order to improve operation efficiency and reduce service cost, home health care routing and scheduling problems (HHCRSPs) have received many concerns from academia and industry in recent years. HHC provides care services to customers and elderly at their homes by assigning proper caregivers and resources as their requirements. Due to the large scale and strong coupling features, as well as various practical requirements in concrete scenarios, there exist a great many of challenges in addressing the HHCRSPs effectively. Recently, metaheuristics have been employed and made breakthroughs in solving such difficult HHCRSPs. This article aims to provide a comprehensive literature review of metaheuristics for handling HHCRSPs. The existing studies regarding HHCRSPs are firstly summarized and analyzed from the perspectives of optimization objectives, number of objectives, uncertainties, constraint conditions, and number of care centers. Next, the metaheuristic algorithms for handling the HHCRSPs are summed up and dissected from the views of classifications, solution encoding and decoding, ensemble of metaheuristics and local search strategies, test instances, performance metrics, statistical analysis, and stopping criteria. Subsequently, challenges of addressing the HHCRSPs are analyzed and discussed. Afterwards, we point out future research directions and significant research contents. Finally, we conclude this research.