Real-time scheduling home caregivers based on disruption management

Unexpected disruptions often occur when home caregivers provide service for customers, such as new requests of customers, cancellations of customers´ services, and changes of customers´ time windows. These disruptions sometimes may make the original plan non optimal or even infeasible. In practice the strategy of rescheduling is usually utilized to obtain a new plan with minimal operational cost, but largely deviates from the original one. To address this kind of situation, we introduce the principle of disruption management into the real-time or disrupted home caregiver scheduling problem. We first define the disruption measurements on customers, caregivers and companies, then take them as the minimization objective, and finally employ a tabu search algorithm with a cost record mechanism to solve the proposed problem. The performance of the strategies of rescheduling and disruption management is compared and discussed in the case study.