A state-of-the-art review of operation research models and applications in home healthcare

Abstract

Healthcare workers and nurses in Home HealthCare (HHC) are routed and scheduled to perform various services at patients’ homes. These services often involve a combination of scheduling, allocation, planning, and vehicle routing problems, and the optimization models for solving these problems become more complex. Therefore, this network has garnered attention from policymakers, researchers, and practitioners. State-of-the-art research is necessary to ensure the quality of service and reduce costs due to the high demand for HHC. This study presents a comprehensive and systematic review of operation research models and applications in HHC, focusing on problem formulation and solutions. These methods include meta-heuristic algorithms and exact methods. We study recent contributions and project future directions in HHC research and applications.

Keywords

• Home healthcare network
• Operation research
• Mathematical modeling
• Meta-heuristic algorithms
• Exact methods