Computers & Industrial Engineering ( IF 7.9 ) Pub Date : 2021-07-22 , DOI: 10.1016/j.cie.2021.107560 Meng Yang 1 , Yaodong Ni 1 , Liu Yang 2
Home health care (HHC) companies serve as the alternative to hospitals aiming to provide customers with medical care at home. A crucial challenge for HHC providers is to optimize routes and schedules for their caregivers to serve customers. Inspired by the practices in the HHC industry, this paper addresses a multi-objective home healthcare routing and scheduling problem (HHRSP) with several conflicting objectives: minimizing routing cost and improving service consistency and workload balance. We refer to the problem as a multi-objective consistent home healthcare routing and scheduling problem (MoConHHRSP). To be more practical, uncertain travel and service times are also considered and defined based on uncertainty theory. Next, the uncertain programming model for the proposed MoConHHRSP is formulated and then reduced to its deterministic equivalent. Due to the NP-hard essence of the problem, an improved multi-objective artificial bee colony (IMOABC) metaheuristic, integrating the large neighborhood search heuristic and an adapted non-dominated solution set update strategy into the multi-objective artificial bee colony (MOABC) framework, is developed. Finally, a series of numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the competitive performance of the designed algorithm by comparing it with other multi-objective algorithms from multiple evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the trade-off analysis reveals that a better caregiver consistency can be achieved at a high price of total costs and workload balance, while a great improvement on the workload balance can be provided with little deterioration in caregiver consistency. In many cases, low total costs and a high level of workload balance can be achieved simultaneously.
中文翻译:
不确定环境下的多目标一致家庭保健路由和调度问题
家庭保健 (HHC) 公司是医院的替代方案,旨在为客户提供在家中的医疗服务。HHC 提供商面临的一个关键挑战是优化他们的护理人员为客户服务的路线和时间表。受 HHC 行业实践的启发,本文解决了多目标家庭医疗保健路由和调度问题 (HHRSP),该问题具有几个相互冲突的目标:最小化路由成本并提高服务一致性和工作负载平衡。我们将该问题称为多目标一致的家庭医疗保健路由和调度问题 (MoConHHRSP)。为了更实际,还基于不确定性理论考虑和定义了不确定的旅行和服务时间。下一个,提出的 MoConHHRSP 的不确定编程模型被制定,然后减少到其确定性等价物。由于问题的 NP 难本质,改进的多目标人工蜂群 (IMOABC) 元启发式,将大邻域搜索启发式和自适应的非支配解集更新策略集成到多目标人工蜂群 (MOABC) 中) 框架,开发。最后,通过从多个评估指标将其与其他多目标算法进行比较,进行了一系列数值实验,以说明所设计算法的竞争性能。此外,权衡分析表明,以总成本和工作量平衡的高代价可以实现更好的护理人员一致性,同时可以大大改善工作量平衡,而护理人员的一致性几乎没有下降。在许多情况下,可以同时实现低总成本和高水平的工作负载平衡。