A periodic repair algorithm for dynamic scheduling in home health care using agent-based model

This paper presents a periodic repair algorithm for dynamic home visit scheduling with the objective of reducing the service cost in home healthcare. In our setting, the health care agency needs to assign practitioners to cover all home visit requests and, at the same time, respect practitioner's availability, eligibility and patient's visit time constraints. We consider a dynamic scheduling problem in which dynamic events occur along with the execution of existing schedules. The occurrence of dynamic events, such as newly added requests, visit cancellations or availability changes, will render the existing schedule infeasible. We propose a repair-based rescheduling algorithm which periodically revises the existing schedule to accommodate the collection of dynamic events during a certain time period. An agent-based simulation model is developed using AnyLogic to validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the service cost of the solutions generated by the proposed algorithm is on average 14% lower than that of the solutions generated by first-come-first-serve policy which is commonly used in home health care scheduling practice.