A Hybrid Approach for Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Using an Agent-Based Model

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Department of Industrial Engineering, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Home health care systems, as a growing economic system in the field of health systems, face various problems and issues such as routing, scheduling and allocation. Given that a growing number of home health care workers in health care systems around the world tend to work for themselves instead of hospitals or other health care institutions. As a result, centralized and one-factor models are not responsible for solving these problems. Therefore, this paper focuses on situations by designing an agent-based planning system that is simulated in a decentralized environment and using the Fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm and the repetitive suggestion mechanism (Vickery) as a negotiation protocol focuses on situations that a home health care agency needs to schedule a home visit among a group of independent physicians. The goal of the home health care agency is to minimize the overall cost of the service by covering all patients by qualified physicians. The results of the implementation of the proposed algorithm for real geographical data in the city of Tehran in GAMS show that this framework achieves high efficiency of optimal solutions.

Keywords

References

  • [1] Castelnovo, C., et al., A multi agent architecture for home care services. Reforming Health Systems: Analysis and Evidence: Strategic Issues in Health Care Management, 2006: p. 135-151.
  • [2] Itabashi, G., et al. A support system for home care service based on multi-agent system. in 2005 5th International Conference on Information Communications & Signal Processing. 2005. IEEE.
  • [3] López-Santana, E.R., J.A. Espejo-Díaz, and G.A. Méndez-Giraldo. Multi-agent approach for solving the dynamic home health care routing problem. in Workshop on Engineering Applications. 2016. Springer.
  • [4] Mohammadi, A. and E.S. Eneyo, Home health care: a multi-agent system based approach to appointment scheduling. J. Innov. Res. Technol, 2015. 2(3): p. 37-46.
  • [5] Mutingi, M. and C. Mbohwa, A home healthcare multi-agent system in a multi-objective envir SAIIE25 Proceedings, 2013: p. 636.
  • [6] Stojanova, A., et al., Agent-based solution of caregiver scheduling problem in home-care context. 2017.
  • [7] Becker, C.A. and I.J. Timm, Planning and scheduling for cooperative concurrent agents with different qualifications in the domain of home health care management. 2019.
  • [8] Becker, C.A. and I.J. Timm, Planning and Scheduling for Cooperative Concurrent Agents in the Domain of Home Health Care Management. 2019.
  • [9] Hamdani, F.E., A. El Mhamedi, and D. Monticolo. Agent-based Approach of Multi-Structures Homecare Planning Problem. in 2019 International Colloquium on Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LOGISTIQUA). 2019. IEEE.
  • [10] Widmer, T. and M. Premm. Agent-based decision support for allocating caregiving resources in a dementia scenario. in German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies. 2015. Springer.
  • [11] Xie, Z., N. Sharath, and C. Wang. A game theory based resource scheduling model for cost reduction in home health care. in 2015 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM). 2015. IEEE.
  • [12] Xie, Z. and C. Wang. A periodic repair algorithm for dynamic scheduling in home health care using agent-based model. in 2017 IEEE 21st International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD). 2017. IEEE.
  • [13] Bajo, J., et al., The THOMAS architecture in Home Care scenarios: A case study. Expert Systems with Applications, 2010. 37(5): p. 3986-3999.
  • [14] Miyamoto, S., et al., Algorithms for fuzzy clustering. 2008: Springer.
  • [15] Miyamoto, S., H. Ichihashi, and K. Honda, BasicMethods for c-Means Clustering, in Algorithms for Fuzzy Clustering. 2008, Springer. p. 9-42.

 

Advances in Industrial Engineering
Volume 55, Issue 2
April 2021
Pages 165-176

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics