Adaptive budget allocation in simheuristics applied to stochastic home healthcare routing and scheduling

The organization of home care is of pivotal importance in response to the trend of delivering more care directly to clients’ residences. With more vulnerable clients residing at home, variability in care durations needs careful consideration. This paper addresses the operational home healthcare routing and scheduling problem (HHCRSP) with uncertainty in travel and service times. The quality of the routes is evaluated based on the expected objective function, incorporating travel time, waiting time, and shift overtime. Due to the complexity of the problem, a simheuristic approach is applied that carefully integrates the optimization of the deterministic HHCRSP with simulation. This study proposes a new framework, based on optimal computing budget allocation and the expected opportunity costs, to dynamically determine when to employ optimization and when to use simulation. A practical case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach and reveals the substantial impact of accounting for randomness in the HHCRSP. • Novel method within general simheuristic framework for dynamic budget allocation. • One of the first to apply simheuristic to routing and scheduling in home healthcare. • Dynamic budget allocation enhances standard simheuristics, giving robust results. • Shows the flaw of deterministic optimization in real-life home healthcare scheduling.