Heuristic and fuzzy scheduling synergy with knowledge acquisition of resource selection system development for home healthcare service

Home healthcare service provides daily medical services at patients homes. The service aims to satisfy the patients requirements which must be done by one or more qualified staff visiting them in right time. This paper proposes a new framework integrating the heuristic search and fuzzy logic with knowledge acquisition to develop reliable and effective decision to match qualified staff to offer homecare services with the minimum cost and better preference consideration under feasible time-slots. The framework is designed based on the hierarchical approach which divides the staff selection system into two layers: high and low level. The high level is responsible for retrieving information, such as patients locations, service distance and operation cost as well as dealing with constraints such as patients requirement and working time-slots. This information is passed to the lower level which is employed with fuzzy logic to estimate a set of the level of staff selection before returning results back to the higher layer to create the service plan. Our empirical study shows that the proposed framework has a potential to provide improved solutions with minimized operating cost and improved patients satisfaction. The case study for the experiment comprises of 40 medical tasks with 8 service routes and 8 carers under time-slot windows.