Home Healthcare Routing and Scheduling Problem During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Taghipour, F.; Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, R.; Eghbali-Zarch, M.

Home healthcare routing and scheduling problems provide a better condition for elderly and disabled people. In the presence of the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 pandemic), these problems have shown their efficiency and necessity to notice this new group of patients suffering from COVID-19. For this purpose, a new mathematical model is developed for a home healthcare routing and scheduling problem (HHCRSP) regarding the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. The satisfaction and cost of assigning staff to patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 are considered. This problem considers travel time between patients and aims to minimize it. The proposed model is solved using GAMS optimization software. Computational experiments are considered for several test problems and a sensitivity analysis is conducted to validate the model performance. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.