Optimisation of home care management

This project concerns home-based health and social care planning and management. This includes the provision of medical and/or caring services offered by carers to clients at their homes. In line with the aim to prolong the time people leave at their homes, this issue has become of paramount importance in the UK, as well as many other countries around the

world [1]. It faces very challenging different quantitative decision-making problems, such as assignment of carers to clients to match the skills of carers with clients’ needs, carers’ routing to determine the order of visits to clients, and carers’ scheduling to allocate the time for clients’ visits. Various objectives and requirements of the variety of home-based services have to be taken into account considering carers’ and clients’ preferences. Furthermore, various uncertainties such as uncertainty in travel times and visit durations, make the planning even more difficult [2, 3].

Typically, these complex decisions are treated individually, where the output of one decision is an input into another one, leading to sub-optimal planning and management.

The aim of this research is to combine different levels of decision-making (tactical and operational levels) and different objectives and constraints in the presence of uncertainty into a single multi-objective optimisation framework.

The successful candidate will develop a novel optimisation model, and apply exact optimisation techniques, and metaheuristics for the optimisation of large-scale problems such as Genetic Algorithm, and/or fuzzy optimisation techniques for treating problems in the presence of uncertainty.

The candidate will gain valuable multidisciplinary skills in modelling home-based health and social care planning problems, analysing results and developing the pilot software.

The successful candidate will be based in Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, which has achieved an established track record in research and has earned a reputation for solving real-world problems in a wide range of industrial sectors.

Nottingham Business School is triple crown accredited with EQUIS, AACSB and AMBA – the highest international benchmarks for business education. It has also been ranked by the Financial Times for its Executive Education programmes in 2023 and 2024. NBS is one of only 47 global business schools recognised as a PRME Champion, and held up as an exemplar by the United Nations of Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME). 

Its purpose is to provide research and education that combines academic excellence with positive impact on people, business and society. As a world leader in experiential learning and personalisation, joining NBS as a researcher is an opportunity to achieve your potential.

Entry requirements:

Entrants must have a Master’s degree in operational research, computer science, mathematics, operations management or a related discipline; interest in uncertainty modelling as well as good programming skills are advantages.

Applications for October 2024 intake closes on 1st August 2024 and applications for Jan 2025 intake closes on 1st October 2024.