Fathollahi-Fard Amir Mohammad, Ahmadi Abbas, Goodarzian Fariba, Cheikhrouhou Naoufel
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Department of Industrial Engineering, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran.
Appl Soft Comput. 2020 Aug;93:106385. doi: 10.1016/j.asoc.2020.106385. Epub 2020 May 8.
Home care services are an alternative answer to hospitalization, and play an important role in reducing the healthcare costs for governments and healthcare practitioners. To find a valid plan for these services, an optimization problem called the home healthcare routing and scheduling problem is motivated to perform the logistics of the home care services. Although most studies mainly focus on minimizing the total cost of logistics activities, no study, as far as we know, has treated the patients' satisfaction as an objective function under uncertainty. To make this problem more practical, this study proposes a bi-objective optimization methodology to model a multi-period and multi-depot home healthcare routing and scheduling problem in a fuzzy environment. With regards to a group of uncertain parameters such as the time of travel and services as well as patients' satisfaction, a fuzzy approach named as the Jimenez's method, is also utilized. To address the proposed home healthcare problem, new and well-established metaheuristics are obtained. Although the social engineering optimizer (SEO) has been applied to several optimization problems, it has not yet been applied in the healthcare routing and scheduling area. Another innovation is to develop a new modified multi-objective version of SEO by using an adaptive memory strategy, so-called AMSEO. Finally, a comprehensive discussion is provided by comparing the algorithms based on multi-objective metrics and sensitivity analyses. The practicality and efficiency of the AMSEO in this context lends weight to the development and application of the approach more broadly.
居家护理服务是住院治疗的一种替代方案，在降低政府和医疗从业者的医疗成本方面发挥着重要作用。为这些服务找到一个有效的计划，一个名为居家医疗路径规划与调度问题的优化问题被提出来以执行居家护理服务的物流安排。尽管大多数研究主要集中在最小化物流活动的总成本，但据我们所知，没有研究将患者满意度作为不确定性下的目标函数。为了使这个问题更具现实意义，本研究提出了一种双目标优化方法，以在模糊环境中对多周期、多配送中心的居家医疗路径规划与调度问题进行建模。对于一组不确定参数，如出行时间、服务时间以及患者满意度，还采用了一种名为希门尼斯方法的模糊方法。为了解决所提出的居家医疗问题，获得了新的和成熟的元启发式算法。尽管社会工程优化器（SEO）已应用于多个优化问题，但尚未应用于医疗路径规划与调度领域。另一个创新是通过使用自适应记忆策略开发一种新的改进型多目标SEO版本，即所谓的AMSEO。最后，通过基于多目标指标的算法比较和敏感性分析进行了全面讨论。AMSEO在这种情况下的实用性和效率为该方法更广泛的开发和应用提供了支持。
