On February 29, 2024, the seminar with Andrea Schaerf will take place.

Abstract

Home healthcare services are carried out by trained caregivers who visit the patient’s home, perform their service operations that depend on the patient’s need. We consider here the home healthcare scheduling and routing problem (HHCRSP), in the formulation proposed by Mankowska et al (2014), which includes synchronization among services and time windows for patients.

To solve the HHCRSP, we propose a local search approach that combines different neighborhoods and is guided by Simulated Annealing. Our study shows that by appropriately tuning our algorithm in a statistically rigorous manner, it outperforms existing methods on publicly available benchmarks. Additionally, we introduce a new and realistic dataset, along with a robust and flexible file format based on JSON, which has the potential to facilitate future comparisons and analyses. Finally, we adapt our search method to an new formulation that extends the one by Mankowska et al (2014), by adding several real-world features. For this novel problem too, we discuss the generation of a new realistic and challenging dataset.

About the Speaker

Andrea Schaerf received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 1994. From 1996 to 1998 he has been Assistant Professor at University of Rome “La Sapienza”. From 1998 to 2005 he has been Associate Professor at University of Udine, where, since 2005, he is Full Professor. From 2015 to 2021 he has been the Head of the School in Management Engineering. He has been Program Co-Chair of the following conferences: PATAT 2016, MIC 2011, and HM-2009. He is in the editorial board of ITOR, Journal of Scheduling, and PeerJ CS. He has been Invited/Plenary Speaker at PATAT-2022, MESS-2018, and ORBEL 27. His main research interests are: Scheduling and Timetabling Problems, Local Search & Metaheuristics for Combinatorial Problems, and Problem Specification Languages and Tools.