Districting Problem in Home Healthcare: A simulated annealing approach

Increasing healthcare costs has made countries to move away from traditional hospitalization towards home healthcare services. Despite of this move, application ofoperations research in home healthcare has not been widely studied in the literature. One of the main problems in home healthcare is districting problem. It is a strategic decision which leads to better management of employees and patient’s satisfaction. In this paper, the home healthcare districting problem is formulated as a linear integer mathematical programming model. Compactness and conformity of districts aswell as work load balance between healthcare teams are the measures taken into account in this paper. The proposed model isthen solved by using a tailored Simulated Annealing (SA)algorithm. The numerical results demonstrate promising efficiency of the proposed solution method