¹École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

Correspondence: A Hertz, Département de mathématiques et de génie industriel, École Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, succ. Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3A7. E-mail: Alain.Hertz@gerad.ca

Received March 2007; Accepted November 2007; Published online 5 March 2008.

Abstract

We consider the problem of assigning patients to nurses for home care services. The aim is to balance the workload of the nurses while avoiding long travels to visit the patients. We analyse the case of the CSSS Côte-des-Neiges, Métro and Parc Extension for which a previous analysis has shown that demand fluctuations may create work overload for the nursing staff. We propose a mixed integer programming model with some non-linear constraints and a non-linear objective which we solve using a Tabu Search algorithm. A simplification of the workload measure leads to a linear mixed integer program which we optimize using CPLEX.