A Hybrid Biased-Randomized Heuristic for a Home Care Problem with Team Scheme Selection

The increasing demand for home care services imposes effective human resource management. The problem concerns the creation of teams of one or two caregivers, serving patient requiring one or two caregivers. The number of teams of each type makes up the team scheme. A single-caregiver team can synchronize for tasks requiring two caregivers. Introducing a novel methodology, we employ a biased-randomized greedy constructive algorithm for route design, comparing it with its hybridization with a local search algorithm. Then, the performance of the hybrid method is compared with that of a mixed integer linear program model and a biased random-key genetic algorithm implementation.