A Responsive Schedule Management System for Large Homecare Organizations

A Responsive Schedule Management System for Large Homecare Organizations

Chakar, T.M.

Barjis, J. (mentor)
Cunningham, S. (mentor)
Verbraeck, A. (mentor)
Unal, A.T. (mentor)

Technology, Policy and Management

Engineering and Policy Analysis

Engineering and Policy Analysis

2011-03-16

The planning and scheduling process of large homecare organizations (LHO) must be responsive as LHO cannot afford postponement and cancellation of services. However, achieving such responsiveness (respond to schedule change requests without violating timing constraints) is a very complex task for such large organizations, due to their extensive geographical spread, fuzzy objectives and uncertain environment. In our research we developed a software architecture which will help LHO to achieve responsive scheduling process. We defined the architecture in four steps. As the first step we proposed to separate the schedule into independent sub schedules. As second step, we proposed scheduling system object model which is suitable for handling of low-level scheduling processes in distributed, multi-user environment. Thirdly, we proposed a centralized scheduling system which can handle shared resources and high level organizational policies. In order to protect the consistency of the centralized schedule, we proposed to use data locks. We propose to use Area (or Team) as atomic locking unit in order to ease the maintenance of the software and to have responsive scheduling process. As fourth and last step of the architecture, we propose to break long taking software tasks into subparts so that the other software tasks can also be processed without waiting too long in the queue.

homecare
responsive
scheduling
distributed
multi-user

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:aedf188d-da29-42f2-8f05-49a89f52d787

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Chakar, T.M.