Routing and scheduling in Home Health Care: A Literature Survey and Bibliometric Analysis

Home Health Care (HHC) agencies aim at providing care and /or services to patients, at their homes, ensuring a quality of service at least equivalent to that given in a hospital, while controlling costs and improving living conditions. The purpose of this paper is to propose a literature survey on ”Home Health Care problems” dealing with routing and scheduling, to provide an overview of the constraints and objectives addressed by Operations Research and Industrial Engineering tools for both theoretical and practical HHC problems. Based on an exhaustive methodology, the current state-of-the-art is reviewed, analyzed, and summarized. We focus not only on the methods used in the different papers studied but also and mainly on constraints and objectives which are specific to the HHC context, particularly highlighting the uncertain and dynamic aspects present in a growing number of papers. This literature survey enables us to identify several research directions, discussed at the end of this paper. It makes it possible for researchers to identify unaddressed problems, or to direct their research towards one or another method according to the constraints and objectives under consideration, while for practitioners, it enables them to see whether their problem has given rise to the development of planning methods. The main contributions of this paper are a synthesis update of the literature dealing with routing and scheduling in the HHC context, a set of comprehensive tables classifying the papers, some discussions on current trends with a focus on the uncertain and dynamic aspects, and future research directions.