Task-splitting in home healthcare routing and scheduling
研究了在家庭医疗护理路线与调度中引入任务拆分，将长时患者访问拆分为可由不同护理人员在不同时间执行的多次访问，以降低运营成本并减少人员需求。
This paper introduces the concept of task-splitting into home healthcare (HHC) routing and scheduling. It focuses on the design of routes and timetables for caregivers providing services at patients’ homes. Task-splitting is the division of a (lengthy) patient visit into separate visits that can be performed by different caregivers at different times. The resulting split parts may have reduced caregiver qualification requirements, relaxed visiting time windows, or a shorter/longer combined duration. However, additional temporal dependencies can arise between them. To incorporate task-splitting decisions into the planning process, we introduce two different mixed integer linear programming formulations, a Miller–Tucker–Zemlin and a time-indexed variant. These formulations aim to minimize operational costs while simultaneously deciding which visits to split and imposing a potentially wide range of temporal dependencies. We also propose pre-processing routines for the time-indexed formulation and two heuristic procedures. These methods are embedded into the branch-and-bound approach as primal and improvement heuristics. The results of our computational study demonstrate the additional computational difficulty introduced by task-splitting possibilities and the associated additional synchronization, and the usefulness of the proposed heuristic procedures. From a planning perspective, our results indicate that integrating task-splitting decisions into the planning process reduces staff requirements, decreases HHC operational costs, and allows caregivers to spend relatively more time on tasks aligned with their qualifications.