Integrated mobility concept for healthcare workers and ambulant patients

Hospital treatment and home care face rising demand in Europe. The rise is caused by increased life expectancy and the growing trend of old people living alone. Thus, the demand for transport of home care workers and vulnerable people is increasing. Today, the transport of home care workers and vulnerable people is performed independent of each other which also leads to congestion of urban areas. We propose an integrated mobility concept to deal with the transport of home care workers and non-time-critical patients. The integrated mobility concept involves a trip sharing system combined with the additional option of walking for home care workers. The home care service provision is related to the drop-off and pick-up of home care workers at the home of patients. Vulnerable people are transported from their homes to hospitals or other medical facilities and then they are picked up after the end of their hospital treatment. We consider that each home care worker and home care job have an associated qualification level. This work addresses the transport of non-time-critical patients and home care workers. Different qualification levels, service time windows, maximum ride times and maximum working hours have to be considered. We implement a matheuristic algorithm to determine this integrated transport. A series of computational experiments allow us to evaluate the impact on the waiting and driving times of the home care workers and non-critical patients. Afterwards, we compare the waiting time and driving time of individual trips versus shared trips. This evaluation sheds light on standards for waiting and ride times.