Dynamic Scheduling of Home Health Care Patients to Medical Providers

Home care provides personalized medical care and social support to patients within their own home. Our work proposes a dynamic scheduling framework to assist in the assignment of patients to health practitioners (HPs) at a single home care agency. We model the decision of which patients to assign to HPs as a discrete-time Markov decision … Read more

A Two-Stage Stochastic Integer Programming Approach to Integrated Staffing and Scheduling with Application to Nurse Management

We study the problem of integrated staffing and scheduling under demand uncertainty. The problem is formulated as a two-stage stochastic integer program with mixed-integer recourse. The here-and-now decision is to find initial staffing levels and schedules, well ahead in time. The wait-and-see decision is to adjust these schedules at a time epoch closer to the … Read more

Benders, Nested Benders and Stochastic Programming: An Intuitive Introduction

This article aims to explain the Nested Benders algorithm for the solution of large-scale stochastic programming problems in a way that is intelligible to someone coming to it for the first time. In doing so it gives an explanation of Benders decomposition and of its application to two-stage stochastic programming problems (also known in this … Read more

Decomposition Algorithms with Parametric Gomory Cuts for Two-Stage Stochastic Integer Programs

We consider a class of two-stage stochastic integer programs with binary variables in the first stage and general integer variables in the second stage. We develop decomposition algorithms akin to the L-shaped or Benders methods by utilizing Gomory cuts to obtain iteratively tighter approximations of the second-stage integer programs. We show that the proposed methodology … Read more