A fuzzy particle swarm optimization approach for task assignment in home health care

Abstract

The assignment of care tasks to healthcare staff in home care organizations is complex. Necessitated by the ever increasing home-based care needs, the need to improve healthcare service quality and efficiency, staff morale, and business competitiveness over the long term, the design of high quality task schedules is imperative. It is especially important to improve high quality task schedules by ensuring that staff workloads are fairly balanced as much as possible. As such, the desired goal is to minimize workload imbalance, while avoiding long distance travels to patients and violation of patients' time windows. However, in practice, the goal is often subjective and imprecise as it involves human preferences from the care givers, the management, and the patients. The present paper develops a fuzzy particle swarm optimization (FPSO) for care task assignment in a home healthcare setting. The FPSO approach uses fuzzy evaluation based on fuzzy set theory. Illustrative computational results show that the approach is promising.