Advanced Two-Stage Algorithm for Efficient Routing and Scheduling in Home Health Care

Home Health Care (HHC) involves the provision of social, medical, and paramedical services within individuals' residences, presenting a multifaceted challenge. This paper introduces an advanced two-stage algorithm developed to address the routing and scheduling complexities inherent in HHC. Initially, based on medical profile similarities, patients are grouped by clustering according to the number of specialties of medical staff. Subsequently, for each patient cluster, routing is conducted using an adaptation of the High-Density Sweep heuristic to generate care vehicle tours. Further, an efficient improvement process combining Nearest Neighbor (NN) heuristics and Local Search (LS) operators refines the solution. Experimental findings of the proposed approach are encouraging in tackling the HHC routing and scheduling problem, offering potential improvements in time efficiency and cost reduction.