Local Search Analysis for a Vehicle Routing Problem with Synchronization and Time Windows Constraints in Home Health Care Services

Abstract This paper presents the vehicle routing problem with time windows and synchronization constraints (VRPTWSyn) in the context of home health care services. We propose a new approach for solving the considered problem. To build an initial solution, we develop a constructive heuristic based on the best insertion heuristic, taking in consideration the synchronization constraints. In order to improve the initial solution, we propose an Iterated Local Search (ILS) metaheuristic coupled with a variant of the Random Variable Neighborhood Descent method (RVND) which uses a random ordering of neighborhoods in local search phase (RVND-ILS algorithm). Computational experiments have been conducted on 15 benchmark instances from the literature. The proposed algorithm, obtains solutions as good as any reported results. In this paper, we propose many neighborhood structures for the problem, and a study of these operators has been conducted as well.