A game theory based resource scheduling model for cost reduction in home health care

Abstract

This paper proposes a game theoretic scheduling model for reducing service cost in home health care. We focus on a setting where a group of independent health care practitioners need to be assigned to home visits within a time window. The practitioners have different skill sets, time constraints and client preferences. They also expect reasonable payments given their skill levels and cost incurred in order to provide the services. On the other hand, the home health agency wants to schedule practitioners to the visits such that all planned visits are covered with qualified practitioners and, at the same time, the overall service cost is minimized. We study the home health care resource scheduling problem in a multi-agent environment consisting of health care agency and self-interested practitioner agents. An iterative bidding framework is proposed as a decentralized decision making tool to enable automated negotiation between the home health agency and the practitioner agents. The effectiveness of the framework is evaluated through a computational study. The results show that the proposed framework computes high quality schedules in the decentralized home health care environment. � 2015 IEEE.