A cardinality-constrained robust approach for the ambulance location and dispatching problem

The nurse-to-patient assignment is one of the main decisions in planning Home Care (HC) services under continuity of care. In the literature, this problem has been tackled with several approaches to take demand variability into account. However, patient’s demands at different time periods have been always assumed as independent, while they are highly correlated in practice. In this work, we propose a robust assignment model that includes the time-dependency of the demands in the HC nurse-to-patient assignment problem, based on the implementor-adversarial framework. Results from a relevant test case show the appropriateness of the approach and the capability to contain costs while respecting the continuity of care constraints.