Homecare planning, a challenging task in a growing market

The homecare services market is large and rapidly growing due to ageing populations and increasingly skewed age demographics. Human resources are the dominant factor simultaneously determining quality of care and driving costs. The planning of homecare services involves allocating personnel among shifts, assigning staff members to patients, routing staff members’ client visits and scheduling treatments. Homecare planning is primarily done manually even though optimisation techniques have aided in solving similar problems in other domains. Efficient homecare planning requires optimisation techniques, but current, related optimisation research suffers from several shortcomings (above all, a lack of integration in handling the different planning sub-problems) and needs certain changes. This paper highlights these shortcomings and suggests approaches to realise the benefits of optimisation techniques in homecare planning.