Descripció del projecte
In general, Social Care refers to provide social work, personal care, protection or social support services to a population in need or at risk, or adults with needs arising from illness, disability, old age or poverty with the objective to meet their specific needs. The population that need these services is: ageing population, physical and mental ill-health population, disabled people, in conclusion, those habitants who have their autonomy total or partially compromised. Among this population, we consider the population with reduced mobility composed by persons with physical disabilities and disabilities which affect the walking capacity in visual, mental and intellectual impairements. One of the main jobs of the Social Care Services is to provide door-to-door transportation services to this population so they can have a better mobility around Barcelona and improve their quality of life. In Barcelona, this service is provided by the Barcelona City Council (Àrea de Drets Socials, Justícia Global, Feminismes i LGTBI). Door-to-door services can be regular or sporadic. Regular services are repeated in hours, origins and destinations and can be easily programmed in advance. Sporadic services are not repeated either in hours, in origins or destinations, and can not be easily programmed very much in advance. Barcelona City Council provides around 240.000 taxi door-to-door services and 31.500 hours of adapted bus a year. One main goal of this service is to be able to provide mobility to the large number of needed population and also to do so in a more efficient way.
The main objectives of the present project are to extend mathematical models and algorithms from Operations Research and Analytics, successfully applied to several industries, to the Social Care sector; and in particular, to optimize the Social Care Mobility services offer to the population with special needs as the population with physical disabilities or limited mobility. We also expect to provide the managers a system that can help them to make better decisions, by improving the quality of the services and reduce their cost, and therefore be able to generate a positive impact in the users, staff, social organization and the society in general.
To achieve these objectives, we design a working plan with the following methodology: Data Analytics, Mathematical Models and Algorithms for Social Care Mobility and finally the implementation phase.
For the Data Analytics, we will apply Descriptive Analytics as Data Mining to help identifying patterns both at the individual level and at the community level, and we will apply also Predictive Analytics to forecast the demand and being able to answer questions like for example: How many people will require mobility in a given area? At what frequency? What is the pattern of the mobility request? What kind of mobility service will be more demanded?
For the Mathematical Models and Algorithms, we will apply Operations Research models and algorithms to study and obtain solutions to mobility problems, as the assignment and scheduling of the vehicles assigned to the requested services in a period of time, the study of the possible services sharing, the routing of the vehicles that provide the mobility services, and at more strategical level the need of the number of vehicles to provide the services in the future. These algorithms will provide a valuable support for the Social Care Mobility managers and stakeholders. The aim is to get closer to the reality in Social Care Mobility by considering the realistic aspects of these services during the development of new optimization models and algorithms, as for example, considering the demand variability and stochasticity, the dynamism of the requested services as last minute call or cancelations and also the potential coordination with other social or/and health care services. By considering these realistic aspects the algorithms produced will be easily applied by the organization helping them to make better decisions.
The three main topics to address are:
Vehicle Assignment and Scheduling- Deterministic planning: Optimization of the scheduling and routing of vehicles (common taxis, adapted taxis, buses, etc.) to realize the set of requested mobility services during a planning period.
Vehicle Assignment and Scheduling Stochastic and Dynamic planning: As in the previous topic but now considering that the demand of the mobility services is quite variable and also consider the dynamism of the services that can have last minute requests or cancelation. This topic will build over the previous one.
Vehicle Assignment and Scheduling coordinated planning with other social and health care services: As in the previous topics but now considering the possibility to coordinate with other social or health care services.
