Securing Home Health Care structures facing forecastable natural disasters: A new tool to regulate between evacuation and adaptive home support services

摘要

This paper aims at developing a new tool to support home health care structures in preparing their risk management plan. Evacuation or adaptive home support is the major decision that managers can take in order to secure their patients. Using risk-based clustering (partitioning) and risk assessment of each patient situation, the proposed tool provides an evacuation plan for the critical patients to be evacuated and a home-support plan for the low-level risk patients that will be kept at home. The model combines a dynamic partitioning model based on individual risk evolution and geographical proximity between patients, and an assignment model considering fixed and variable costs. The experiments are performed with the commercial solver CPLEX and the computing time is acceptable for real size instances.