Home Healthcare Staff Scheduling: A Clustering Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

The home healthcare staff scheduling problem is concerned with the allocation of care tasks to healthcare staff at a minimal cost, subject to healthcare service requirements, labor law, organizational requirements, staff preferences, and other restrictions. Healthcare service providers strive to meet the time window restrictions specified by the patients to improve their service quality. This paper proposes a clustering particle swam optimization methodology (CPSO) for addressing the scheduling problem. The approach utilizes the strengths of unique grouping techniques to efficiently exploit the group structure of the scheduling problem, enabling the algorithm to provide good solutions within reasonable computation times. Computational results obtained in this study demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of CPSO approach.