Demand-Driven Task-Scheduling in a Nursing Home Setting: A Genetic Algorithm Approach

Nursing homes face the challenge to develop task assignment strategies that enable them to timely and efficiently meet the demand of their clients. In this contribution, we analyze a practice-based task scheduling problem with small time windows and care workers with different qualification levels. A set of care tasks has to be assigned to a given number of care workers with the objective of delivering the care as close as possible to the time preferences of the nursing home clients. To solve this problem, we propose a scheduling approach in which a Genetic Algorithm is combined with an Integer Linear Program. We verified the approach using numerical experiments. The next step will be to test the algorithm with reallife data and to implement it in practice