15240 - Home Healthcare Optimisation Engineer – KTP Associate

15240 - Home Healthcare Optimisation Engineer – KTP Associate

CSE / School of Mathematics / Oran Homecare Ltd.

Full-time: 35 hours per week

Fixed term: 24 months

Primarily based at Oran Homecare Ltd.’s offices in Kirkcaldy

The University of Edinburgh and Oran Homecare Ltd. have been awarded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) funded by Innovate UK to develop and implement a robust, flexible, and scalable routing and scheduling tool for optimising home health care services. The goal is to replace the highly manual, constraint heavy scheduling processes with a configurable in-house system capable of supporting diverse planning restrictions and goals within Oran Homecare Ltd. as well as across the sector. This is an innovation project which will draw on the knowledge and expertise of the KTP Associate working together with Dr Jörg Kalcsics in the School of Mathematics and Dr James Richings in the EPCC at the University of Edinburgh.

Oran Homecare Ltd. is an award-winning provider of Care at Home, Hospital Discharge and Assisted Living services throughout Scotland. Their mission is to raise the standards of care throughout the UK. Oran has a track record of innovating in partnership with other bodies throughout the social care sector and is currently developing state of the art scheduling software in partnership with the University of Edinburgh to improve coordination throughout the sector.

The Opportunity

We are seeking an independent and motivated KTP Associate with a track record in mathematical modelling and the design of optimisation algorithms in applied research or in industry, ideally with a focus on home healthcare, transport logistics, or last-mile delivery problems, expertise in data analysis and engineering, and proficiency in C/C++. Experience in high-performance computing and cross-disciplinary collaboration is desirable.

Over 24 months, you will further develop a heuristic-based optimisation tool for scheduling and routing home healthcare workers to support Oran Homecare’s daily operations. Your work will span five stages covering successive aspects of the development: (1) learning the trade of home healthcare planning processes and tools; (2) developing automated data ingestion pipelines and data cleaning, validation, and testing methods; (3) modularising the existing prototype optimisation tool; (4) extending the tool by new planning restrictions and goals, devising trade-off mechanisms for conflicting goals, and applying state-of-the-art concepts from high-performance computing to improve efficiency; (5) creating demo case studies and training material. You will have ability to adapt the schedule within the bounds of the project and you will collaborate closely with the Oran Homecare Ltd. team.

The detailed work plan for the project is available upon request from Dr Jörg Kalcsics (joerg.kalcsics@ed.ac.uk).

This post is full-time (35 hours per week), primarily based at Oran Homecare Ltd.’s offices in Kirkcaldy, with weekly visits to the University of Edinburgh. We are open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-site working. The post will be managed within Oran Homecare Ltd. with supervision by Jonathan McFarlane (Director) and Katie Vanbeck (Deputy Manager) and the academic leads at the School of Mathematics (Dr Jörg Kalcsics) and at EPCC (Dr James Richings) at the University of Edinburgh.

As part of this role, you may have the opportunity to publish research in top-tier journals, contribute to developing production-grade optimisation tools, and gain significant commercial exposure in the ever-growing home healthcare sector.

Whilst you will be employed by UoE, the details of your terms and conditions will be discussed further at interview and are subject to Oran Homecare’s terms and conditions, including any salary increases.