Human Resource Scheduling and Routing Problem in Home HealthCare Context: A Literature Review

Home Health Care (HHC) service is an alternative to the conventional hospitalization. The goal is to deliver medical, paramedical and social services to patients at their homes, which help them to improve and keep their best clinical, psychological and social conditions. As a large number of resources (i.e., material and human) contribute to delivering the HHC service, there are many issues that should be considered. Among these, the resource scheduling and routing problem (i.e., deciding in which sequence each operator will visit patients assigned to him/her) is one of the most important issues to be addressed while planning HHC resources. In this paper, we review studies in the literature that address the scheduling and routing problem as a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) or Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in the HHC context. We analyze each study according to four main categories: i) study characteristics, ii) modeling characteristics, iii) network characteristics, and iv) data characteristics. The objective of this review is to highlight the unexplored issues in researches dealing with the resource scheduling and routing problem, formulated as either TSP or VRP in the HHC context.