A Robust Optimization Model for Home Care Service Planning with Uncertain Operator Availability

The continuous ageing of the population, combined with the need to contain healthcare costs, is placing increasing pressure on traditional hospital-centered systems. In this context, Home Health Care (HHC) services represent a sustainable alternative, providing medical and social assistance directly at patients’ homes while improving quality of life. We consider an integrated HHC planning problem involving patient–operator assignment, visit scheduling, and routing decisions over a given planning horizon, subject to skill compatibility, operator availability, and geographical constraints. We address this problem under uncertainty in operators’ availability. To this end, we develop a robust optimization framework that explicitly accounts for deviations from nominal availability when defining the service plan, ensuring solution feasibility under adverse scenarios.