Title: Multi-objective home health nurse routing with remote monitoring devices

Authors: Ashlea Bennett Milburn; Jessica Spicer

Addresses: University of Arkansas, 4207 Bell Engineering Center, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA ' University of Arkansas, 4207 Bell Engineering Center, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA

Abstract: A multi-objective home health nurse routing and scheduling problem variant with the option of assigning some patient visits to remote monitoring devices is defined. A metaheuristic solution approach that approximates the Pareto optimal frontier for travel cost, nurse consistency and balanced workload objectives is developed. This set of objectives represents possibly conflicting interests - those of the agency, patients, and nurse workforce. A computational study is conducted to determine the tradeoffs among these objectives when creating nurse routes and schedules.

Keywords: consistent VRP; vehicle routing problem; multi-objective optimisation; metaheuristics; telehealth; home healthcare; nurse scheduling; nurse routing; remote monitoring; home care; patient visits; Pareto optimal frontier; travel cost; nurse consistency; balanced workload; objectives tradeoff.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPS.2013.059677

International Journal of Planning and Scheduling, 2013 Vol.1 No.4, pp.242 - 263

Received: 03 Jan 2013
Accepted: 16 May 2013
Published online: 30 Jun 2014 *

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