Home health care routing and scheduling: A review

• This review investigates recent work on home health care routing and scheduling.
• A comprehensive overview with a focus on considered problem settings is given.
• Single-period and multi-period problems are differentiated.
• Results highlight a heterogeneous research field of public interest.
• Recent advances and future research directions are discussed.

In home health care (HHC) operations, nurses are scheduled and routed to perform various services at clients' homes. As this often requires a combination of vehicle routing and scheduling approaches, resulting optimization problems are complex and, hence, of high interest to stakeholders such as researchers, practitioners and policy-makers. With demand for HHC expected to increase substantially, future work is essential to decrease costs and to guarantee service quality. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of current work in the field of HHC routing and scheduling with a focus on considered problem settings. Recent advances in HHC optimization are highlighted and future research directions discussed.

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