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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