Abstract
The assignment of home care tasks to nursing staff is a complex problem for decision makers
concerned with optimizing home healthcare operations scheduling and logistics. Motivated
by the ever-increasing home-based care needs, the design of high quality task assignments is
highly essential for maintaining or improving worker moral, job satisfaction, service
efficiency, service quality, and to ensure that business competitiveness remains momentous.
To achieve high quality task assignments, the assigned workloads should be balanced or fair
among the care givers. Therefore, the desired goal is to balance the workload of care givers
while avoiding long distance travels in visiting the patients. However, the desired goal is
often subjective as it involves the care givers, the management, and the patients. As such,
the goal tends to be imprecise in the real world. This paper develops a fuzzy group genetic
algorithm (FGGA) for task assignment in home healthcare services. The FGGA approach uses
fuzzy evaluation based on fuzzy set theory. Results from illustrative examples show that the
approach is promising.