Optimization of Quality in Home Care

Abstract: As the older population grows larger there is a growing need to provide health care at home. This services are generally done without operational research. As more people will require home care there will be a need to increase the efficiency of the service while keeping the quality high. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how we can use operation research in home care as well as define how we can model the quality and use those quality parameters in order to offer the best possible service. The model uses VRP with Time windows in order to schedule the routes and incorporates service requirements at the customers. A solution is obtained by first constructing an initial solution that fulfills the duration constraint. Then it uses a local search with a dynamic insertion heuristic to improve on the solution. Tabu search is used as a meta-heuristic to prevent the solution the get stuck in a local minima. The solver is used in order to optimize the quality parameters. The result obtained can be used to help home care providers to determine the level of quality they can supply with a limited budget