CHAIEB Marouene

The Home Health Care Scheduling Problem (HCSP) is an optimization problem representing an emerging approach for delivering health care services. Home health care consists of assigning a set of caregivers or nurses to provide health service to patients at their home. Nowadays, such kind of services are highly requested due to the increasing of number of elderly peoples who need to be treated at their homes. Moreover, the HCSP solution will lead to decrease the usage of hospital facilities and the may be used to accommodate more critical cases. Additionally, some patients need long life treatment that should be provided periodically by skilled personnel without a need to go to hospitals. The HCSP was extensively studied and a variety of approaches were proposed for modeling and solving [1]. In this paper, we present a new approach to solve the HCSP. We propose a hierarchical model of the home health care scheduling problem that consists of dividing the problem into a set of interconnected sub problems easier to solve. The obtained model is a result of the application of the Hierarchical Modeling Approach proposed in [2]. The HCSP hierarchical model will be solved using different algorithms to solve each sub problem at each level respecting the type of inter-connection between them. In the next sections, we detail the proposed approaches for modelling and solving the HCSP.