10.4230/LIPICS.ICLP.2012.415
Cattafi, Massimiliano
Massimiliano
Cattafi
Herrero, Rosa
Rosa
Herrero
Gavanelli, Marco
Marco
Gavanelli
Nonato, Maddalena
Maddalena
Nonato
Malucelli, Federico
Federico
Malucelli
Improving Quality and Efficiency in Home Health Care: an application of Constraint Logic Programming for the Ferrara NHS unit
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
2012
Article
CLP(FD)
Nurse Scheduling Applications
Home Health Care
Dovier, Agostino
Agostino
Dovier
Costa, Vítor Santos
Vítor Santos
Costa
2012
2012-09-05
2012-09-05
2012-09-05
en
urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-36419
10.4230/LIPIcs.ICLP.2012
978-3-939897-43-9
1868-8969
10.4230/LIPIcs.ICLP.2012
LIPIcs, Volume 17, ICLP 2012
Technical Communications of the 28th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'12)
2013
17
38
415
424
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
Dovier, Agostino
Agostino
Dovier
Costa, Vítor Santos
Vítor Santos
Costa
1868-8969
Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)
2012
17
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
10 pages
484379 bytes
application/pdf
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Although sometimes it is necessary, no one likes to stay in a hospital, and patients who need to stay in bed but do not require constant medical surveillance prefer their own bed at home. At
the same time, a patient in a hospital has a high cost for the community, that is not acceptable if the patient needs service only a few minutes a day.
For these reasons, the current trend in Europe and North-America is to send nurses to visit patients in their home: this choice reduces costs for the community and gives better quality of life to patients. On the other hand, it introduces the combinatorial problem of assigning patients to the available nurses in order to maximize the quality of service, without having nurses travel for overly long distances.
In this paper, we describe the problem as a practical application of Constraint Logic Programming. We first introduce the problem, as it is currently addressed by the nurses in the National Health Service (NHS) in Ferrara, a mid-sized city in the North of Italy. Currently, the nurses solve the problem by hand, and this introduces several inefficiencies in the schedules.
We formalize the problem, obtained by interacting with the nurses in the NHS, into a Constraint Logic Programming model. In order to solve the problem efficiently, we implemented a new constraint that tackles with the routing part of the problem. We propose a declarative
semantics for the new constraint, and an implementation based on an external solver.
LIPIcs, Vol. 17, Technical Communications of the 28th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'12), pages 415-424