Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem for Newborns and Mothers: A Case Study in Ho Chi Minh City

The Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP) has become one of the major consideration for many Home Health Care (HHC) service providers who deliver home and personal care services directly to customers' homes. Satisfying customers' needs and caregivers' well-being requires and saving a comprehensive approach that balances the quality of care provided to patients with the well-being and job satisfaction of caregivers. This study has developed a mixed-integer programming model with the aim of minimizing travel distances while simultaneously achieving a balanced workload, meeting clients' requirements, and accommodating caregivers' lunch breaks. For small-scale problems, this study employed CPLEX software to solve to find the optimal solutions. For large-scale problems, these problems were divided into smaller problems by using (Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering) AHC and K-meaning Algorithms. The obtained results indicate that the combination of the AHC algorithm and CPLEX yields superior solutions compared to the utilization of the K-means algorithm and CPLEX via testing randomly generated datasets. The proposed approach is put to the test in a real-world case study conducted in Ho Chi Minh City.