The Value of Decision Integration in Home Care Scheduling and Routing
Résumé
This paper addresses a multi-period home care scheduling and routing problem. The problem is modeled as a combination of Personnel Scheduling and Vehicle Routing Problems, augmented with application-specific constraints such as continuity of care, caregiver skills and work regulations. We propose two solution strategies: an integrated approach and a two-phase sequential approach. We compare these two approaches through numerical experiments, which enable us to analyze how the integration of multiple dimensions, from schedule and route construction to continuity of care, affects both the computational difficulty of the problem and the quality of the solutions obtained. Our results show that the sequential approach often provides faster solutions. However, the integrated approach can achieve comparable performance within acceptable run times. Moreover, it generally outperforms the sequential approach in terms of several quality indicators, most notably the total scheduling and routing cost.