This work addresses a home health care scheduling problem faced by home care agencies. In home health care scheduling, there is a desire to retain consistency with respect to the home health aide servicing each patient; this consistency is referred to as continuity of care. To address this preference for continuity of care, we propose a rolling horizon approach to the scheduling problem and introduce the consistent home health care scheduling problem (Con-HHCSP). The goal is to be able to quantify and control the deviation of the new schedule suggested each day from the existing schedule in place, so that some of the existing assignments may be retained in the new schedule that is produced. We present two different methods to solve Con-HHCSP on a daily basis: an integer programming-based method with approximations and a variant of a petal heuristic. We discuss the performance and computational efficiency of these methods.

这项工作解决了家庭护理机构面临的家庭医疗保健调度问题。在家庭医疗保健安排中，希望保持为每位患者提供服务的家庭医疗助理的一致性；这种一致性被称为护理的连续性。为了解决这种对护理连续性的偏好，我们提出了一种滚动范围方法来解决调度问题，并引入了一致的家庭医疗保健调度问题（Con-HHCSP）。目标是能够量化和控制每天建议的新时间表与现有时间表的偏差，以便一些现有的作业可以保留在生成的新时间表中。我们提出了两种不同的方法来每天求解 Con-HHCSP：基于整数规划的近似方法和花瓣启发式的变体。我们讨论这些方法的性能和计算效率。