ATTENTION/WARNING - NE PAS DÉPOSER ICI/DO NOT SUBMIT HERE

Ceci est la version de TEST de DIAL.mem. Veuillez ne pas soumettre votre mémoire sur ce site mais bien à l'URL suivante: 'https://thesis.dial.uclouvain.be'.
This is the TEST version of DIAL.mem. Please use the following URL to submit your master thesis: 'https://thesis.dial.uclouvain.be'.
 

Home Hospitalization: A Bi-objective problem considering Travel Time and Continuity of Care, and accounting for Workload Balance

Martins, Margarida
(2021)

Files

MARTINS_13931800_2021.pdf
  • UCLouvain restricted access
  • Adobe PDF
  • 3.69 MB

Details

Supervisors
Semal, Pierre ; Marques Ines
Faculty
Louvain School of Management
Degree label
Master [120] en ingénieur de gestion
Abstract
The increase in life expectancy has resulted in an aging population with more need for hospital care. These factors have encouraged the emergence of new alternatives to conventional hospitalization, which is the case of Home Hospitalization. A bi-objective optimization problem is developed, aiming to minimize Travel Times and maximize Continuity of Care while ensuring Workload Balance. The purpose is to account for the three stakeholders' perspectives: managers, patients, and care workers. In the proposed model, nurses and physicians are assigned to teams that travel by car to locations representing the patients' homes, respecting some constraints. The epsilon-constraint method is used to find the approximate Pareto front of the two conflicting objectives. The trade-off between the objectives is analyzed through the computational results. Two different approaches are discussed to help decide on the Pareto front's best solution: Crowding distance and TOPSIS. Based on the real-world instances provided by the hospital under study, the proposed method can provide, on average, a reduction in Travel Time by 7.09%, an increase in Continuity of Care of 35.18% and an increase of 65.73% on Workload Balance. Thus, the three stakeholders' perspectives can be improved significantly with the use of the model. Numerical experiments are also conducted in literature instances.