Planning and Optimization of Home Care Services at the Operational Level – PONOSaD

The project “Planning and Optimization of Home Care Services at the Operational Level” aims to develop decision support tools for professional home care. In a context where home care activities increase significantly, few tools are adapted to operational management requirements because of their specificities. The overall goal of the project is to help these types of services to be more efficient, economical and provide a better quality of services and thus obtain societal benefits. These objectives can be achieved through better planning and optimization of operations that also be able to improve the quality of life of staff. Thus, the developed tools have to be generic, flexible and robust to assist in their planning. The main challenge is to model and to solve a set of new problems related to the management of home care. These problems are highly combinatorial and therefore very complex, this point is the key to obtain decision support tools that are relevant and efficient. These static or dynamic problems that are similar to some problems identified in the literature of transportation and vehicle routing problems, will be addressed by the techniques of Operations Research. However the specificities of this field will implies that the existing tools cannot be apply unchanged. New innovative and effective methods have to be proposed, developed and tested. These support decision tools will be included in a platform. This one will enable a management of the data for planning and actions to do following the decisions taken. In this last case, the innovative specificity of the platform will be a two-way interaction in real time with the home care staff thanks to the mobile applications.

The project is planned for a period of 42 months and is divided into 7 major tasks. The first one is dedicated to organizational and monitoring project. The second task aims to do a complete state of the art in connection with this study, consisting of an inventory of the different structures of home care and a review of literature around this area. The third task concerns the modeling. It will use the analysis of the state of the art to provide formal and generic models for problems identified. The fourth task will be based on polyhedral theory to analyze mathematical properties of formulations proposed in order to develop exact methods and to define some lower bounds. The fifth task aims to develop approximate methods for solving real problems within a reasonable time. They have to be flexible and robust. The sixth task is to develop a simulation model to test these methods in a dynamic and realistic way and to compare on the criteria of performance, flexibility and robustness. The last task will focus on the design of the platform composed of an information system, a system for support decision tool and interfaces between the different actors of home care.

The project coordinator will be Yannick Kergosien, a young researcher who started his position since Sept. 2012. The grants for this project, for which the most part is dedicated to funding a PhD student, would help to realize his own research that he began during a postdoctoral fellowship at Montreal in the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and transportation. This project will include collaboration with two researchers from the center.