OR problems related to Home Health Care: A review of relevant routing and scheduling problems

The home health care routing and scheduling problem (HHCRSP) consists of designing a set of routes used by care workers to provide care to patients who live in the same geographic area and who must be treated at home. Hence, care activities, i.e., patient visits, must be planned to minimize measures, such as travel costs or to maximize the quality of service delivered to patients while respecting several constraints. The HHCRSP is an extension of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) with unusual side-constraints that make the issues difficult to solve. This paper details a comprehensive overview of recent OR models developed for the HHCRSP, a field that has received a great amount of attention in recent years. To summarize the existing research contributions, we initially identify the most relevant features considered in the HHCRSP models, and then analyze the existing literature according to the way the different studies formulate the constraints and objective functions. We then provide an overview of methods developed to solve the HHCRSP and discuss future research directions.