Management of the care activities in Home Health Care Services: The routing and scheduling of caregivers level

The Home Care Services (HCS) provide continuous and coordinated health cares at the patient´s home. This paper addresses the problem of routing and scheduling of caregivers of a HCS under precedence and coordination constraints. Indeed, each patient may be visited many caregivers per day. Each visit is provided by a different caregiver. Moreover, visits should not be performed simultaneously and sometimes in a pre-defined order. Two mixed integer programming (MILP) models are proposed, based respectively on TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem) and RCPSP (Resources Constrained Project Scheduling Problem). Numerical results allow, in one side to define the axes of complexity for this problem. In another side, the results allow us to define the context of efficiency of each model.