Optimization of the re-routing of the caregivers in care at home

Care at home is a sector in full rise. This sector covers various activities such as help at home, personal assistance, home health care… This sector opens new avenues of research in the fields of industrial engineering and optimization, such as the optimization of the routing of the various caregivers, and more particularly the recalculation of the tours due to an admission or due to an evolution of a patient’s need. These problems are real scientific challenging avenues because, on the one hand, specific constraints must be taken into account, such that the big variety of the skills and the constraints of the caregivers (help at home, nurse, physiotherapist, social worker…) and on the other hand because this sector is characterized by two specificities. Indeed let us note first of all that the uncertainty is inherent to this sector: uncertainty about the duration of the travel, the duration of the care, the evolution of the patients’ needs. Finally, the objective function is also a specificity of those problems; indeed here one of the major objectives to satisfy is the quality of service, the costs being not of course, here as elsewhere to be neglected.

The first step of this PhD thesis will be a bibliographical study on the problems of recalculation of routing, on one hand, and on the problems of routing in the sector of the help at home, on the other hand. At the same time, a field study will be lead to identify practical specificities, constraints objectives of optimization focusing our attention to the consideration of the human aspect. Once this first step is realized, various solutions of re-routing, various considerations and modeling of the human aspects and various scenarios of consideration of the uncertainties will be studied, implemented and tested on the data generated or obtained from the information carried out by the field study.

Contact(s) :

Marie-Laure Espinouse
Laboratoire G-SCOP
Mail : Marie-Laure.Espinouse@g-scop.grenoble-inp.fr
Tel.: 04 56 52 89 26

Maria Di-Mascolo
Laboratoire G-SCOP
Mail: Maria.Di-Mascolo@g-scop.grenoble-inp.fr
Tel: 04 76 57 46 25