An Empirical Study of Volunteer Assignment Problem in an Elder Care Management Support System

• Main Authors: WANG PAI-LU, 王百祿
• Other Authors: 李俊民
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/33512066605156158794

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 資訊管理學系 === 92 === This study not only developed a prototype of an elder health-care management information system, but also the system first integrated a volunteer assignment decision support system on Internet. This study then built a simple prototype of web-based elder health-care management support system (WEHMSS) under the development of evolutionary prototyping. The prototype should be a foundation of all elder-care information systems for government assigning volunteers to public and private elder-care centers. Moreover, the empirical example is the Social Affairs Bureau of Taipei County Government, and the platform of the prototype was developed by using an Internet development tool, MS ASP, for coordinating the operations of all elder-care centers. In fact, on-line analytic processing (OLAP) and statistical analysis from data warehouse, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), geography information system (GIS), etc. provide all related parameters and data for solving the volunteer assignment problem. Since the problem is NP-hard even for single objective, the optimal solutions of small-sized problems are solved by the weighting method and the famous business software, Lingo, in the prototype. For large-sized problems, a heuristic algorithm was developed for obtaining good enough or satisfactory solutions. Experimental results show that the heuristics performs very well, and the heuristic solution can be obtained in a short time and its objective vale is close to the upper bound of the optimal solution or even equals the optimal solution. Finally, managerial analyses are derived from the results of operations and their decision making of the prototype, such that more managerial guidelines and improved suggestions for each customer characteristics of all elder-care centers can be provided for the references of decision making and the foundation of future research.