PSO-based algorithm for home care worker scheduling in the UK
By Chananes Akjiratikarl, P. Yenradee, P. Drake. Computers & industrial engineering, 2007
306 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper presents the novel application of a collaborative population-based meta-heuristic technique called Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to the scheduling of home care workers. The technique is applied to a genuine situation arising in the UK, where the provision of community care service is a responsibility of the local authorities. Within this provision, optimization routes for each care worker are determined in order to minimize the distance traveled providing that the capacity and service time window constraints are not violated. The objectives of this paper are twofold; first to exploit a systematic approach to improve the existing schedule of home care workers, second to develop the methodology to enable the continuous PSO algorithm to be efficiently applied to this type of problem and all classes of similar problems. For this problem, a particle is defined as a multi-dimensional point in space which represents the corresponding care activities and assignment priority. The Heuristic Assignment scheme is specially designed to transform the continuous PSO algorithm to the discrete job schedule. The Earliest Start Time Priority with Minimum Distance Assignment (ESTPMDA) technique is developed for generating an initial solution which guides the search direction of the particle. Local improvement procedures (LIP), i.e. insertion and swap, are embedded in the PSO algorithm in order to further improve the solution quality. The proposed methodology is implemented, tested, and compared with existing solutions on a variety of real problem instances.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14374a6f9957b80c59253f02e15529dcb5eb87f6
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
- Frank Meisel
- Christian Bierwirth
- Philippe De Bruecker
- Dorota Slawa Mankowska
- Erik L. Demeulemeester
- Jorne Van den Bergh
- Jeroen Beliën
In Management Science and Operations Research
- Philippe De Bruecker
- Christian Bierwirth
- Dorota Slawa Mankowska
- Erik L. Demeulemeester
- Frank Meisel
- Jorne Van den Bergh
- Jeroen Beliën
Citations in the corpus
- Personnel scheduling: A literature review (2013, background): “In addition to these three general classes, a lot of alternative heuristics have been developed for dealing with the personnel scheduling problem: scatter search [70, 179, 198, 202], iterated local search [49, 71], variable neighborhood search [74, 207], particle swarm optimization [7, 142, 219], me”
- The home health care routing and scheduling problem with interdependent services (2013, methodology): “[1] present an application of Particle Swarm Optimization to home care employee scheduling in the UK without considering interdependent services.”