With improved medical services and increasing life expectancy, there is a growing number of elderly people in societies who require further care and treatment. Meanwhile, increased costs associated with clinical treatments combined with popularity of home care services have overwhelmed home care service organizations with overflowing demand. Therefore, it is necessary that such organizations make use of appropriate planning methods in order to reduce operational costs and promote their services. This paper introduces a model for home care services planning. The proposed model considers all quality criteria such as care continuity, time windows, and skill matching simultaneously. Moreover, periodic demand has been incorporated into the model which is unprecedented in the home care services literature. The proposed model, unlike previous studies that involved daily time windows, has made use of a six-day time horizon. Since the developed model includes scheduling, routing and assignment problems, exact methods are not suitable solution approaches for such problem. Thus, we have developed a Simulated Annealing metaheuristic algorithm that incorporates heuristic and math-based local searches. Computational tests on a set of randomly generated instances indicate the effectiveness of the developed algorithm.

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