Mid-term and short-term planning support for home health care services

In this paper we are looking at routing and scheduling problems arising in the context of home health care services. Many small companies are working in this sector in Germany and planning is still done manually, resulting in long planning times and relatively inflexible solutions. First, we consider the home health care problem (HHCP) which seeks for a weekly optimal plan. However, in practice a master schedule is generated which is modified to incorporate operational changes. We take this approach into account by looking at the master schedule problem (MSP) and at the operational planning problem (OPP). The problems are solved using different metaheuristics combined with methods from constraint programming. This allows a very flexible treatment of realistic constraints. Computational results are presented using real world data.