A Novel Concept for Home Healthcare Operations Using Electric Home Delivery Vehicles

A Novel Concept for Home Healthcare Operations Using Electric Home Delivery Vehicles

Dann Ruiz, Nicolas (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering)

Duinkerken, M.B. (mentor)
Negenborn, R.R. (graduation committee)
Grieco, Luca (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Mechanical Engineering | Multi-Machine Engineering

2022-10-13

Healthcare systems worldwide rely heavily on the efficient allocation of caregivers in home- based care. Despite this, to this day, the majority of home healthcare (HHC) organisations plan their operations manually, an extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive task yielding sub-optimal solutions. Research efforts in the operations research (OR) field have extensively studied said problem under the HHC routing and scheduling problem (HHCRSP). However, the separate consideration of the planning of caregivers and re- sources required at visits are considered a relevant gap in the literature, as real-world organisations must plan both simultaneously.
As a solution toward bridging this gap, this paper proposes the introduction of home de- livery vehicles (HDVs) to support HHC operations, in which the vehicles deliver resources required at patient visits in time for consultation. A mathematical formulation consider- ing the routing, scheduling, and synchronisation of caregivers and vehicles is presented, in which partial battery charging alongside hard visit and working time windows are key characteristics. A genetic algorithm (GA) is further developed to solve the proposed for- mulation, which is proven to perform efficiently in benchmark instances for the vehicle routing problem (VRP). Simulations were run on data generated synthetically by a sta- tistical model recreating the HHC needs of the London Borough of Islington. The results highlight the potential benefits of adopting such technology, resulting in an average re- duction of the required medical resources of 49.94% and a 19.23% reduction in costs with respect to standard operations using the same number of resources.
Overall, the most economical operating strategy for a HHC organisation was identified to be the purchase of a number of resources equal to the number of visits requiring said re- sources. Such an approach was found to decrease the costs per visit by 1.26% with respect to HDVs. The marginal amount, however, is expected to be diminished in the coming years due to factors not captured in the analysis such as the higher scalability of HDVs and their resulting potential to meet the anticipated growth in demand for HHC, the ex- pected decrease in the price of electric vehicle technology, the economic incentives offered to adopt said technologies, and the potential collaboration between caregivers and HDVs. These, alongside extensions to the proposed model such as non-linear battery charging, are proposed as future research avenues.

Home healthcare routing and scheduling problem
home delivery vehicles
genetic algorithm
Synthetic data

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d0dff835-a218-48ce-ae31-3f54a562d61b

Student theses

master thesis

© 2022 Nicolas Dann Ruiz