Planning and Scheduling for Cooperative Concurrent Agents with Different Qualifications in the Domain of Home Health Care Management

Colja A. Becker, Ingo J. Timm

Keywords: Planning and Scheduling, Temporal Planning, Multiagent Planning, Cooperative Multiagent Planning, Home Health Care, Logistics

Abstract:

Rising demand for home health care services combined with a shortage of professionals leads to increasing workload of existing employees. However, there is a performance limit so that it will no longer be possible to offer these services maintaining quality and economic viability without changing operational management.
To cope with this situation, we propose a concept of task bundle splitting options among several cooperative agents with different qualifications. Further, we integrate this concept in a planning and scheduling algorithm for multiple concurrent agent actions which can increase efficiency and can improve use of limited resources in operational processes.
For this purpose, possible concurrent actions of agents with different qualifications were evaluated combined with the scheduling process and compared to alternatives. As a first step, this contribution presents the concept as well as an algorithm generating an optimal solution and gives an insight into future work.

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