Published: Routing and Scheduling in Home Health Care with Time Slot Selection (TRE 2026)
I am pleased to share that our paper "Routing and scheduling in home health care with time slot selection" has been published in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review (2026).
This research addresses a growing challenge in modern home healthcare operations: how to simultaneously optimise caregiver routing and the set of appointment time slots offered to patients through online booking platforms.
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Abstract
Home healthcare (HHC) agencies increasingly allow patients to book appointment time slots online, improving convenience but introducing complex scheduling challenges. This study presents a bi-level Stackelberg optimisation model: at the upper level, the agency selects which time slots to offer to each patient; at the lower level, patients choose among the posted options according to a Multinomial Logit (MNL) discrete choice model based on caregiver familiarity, skill level, and time-slot attractiveness.
The integrated problem is NP-hard, combining discrete choice probabilities with a Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). We design a tailored Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) algorithm with novel time-slot perturbation mechanisms and customized ruin-and-recreate operators. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that offering 3–4 time slots per patient yields the optimal balance between patient satisfaction and caregiver routing efficiency. Caregiver familiarity is identified as the dominant driver of patient satisfaction.
Key Contributions
- Novel integrated model: First bi-level framework combining online time slot posting decisions with HHC routing and scheduling under stochastic patient choice.
- Tailored ALNS: Outperforms commercial solvers (Gurobi) on large-scale instances, finding high-quality solutions in minutes vs. infeasibility in 24 hours.
- Managerial insight: The "3–4 slot sweet spot" provides a practical operational guideline for HHC administrators worldwide.