Crew Constrained Home Care Routing Problem with Time Windows

This paper addresses the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) of a Home Health Care (HCC) service provider that serves patients requesting different types of care. In this problem, HCC services are provided by two types of personnel, nurses and health care aides, and the number of each type of personnel is limited. Each patient must be visited exactly once even if her servicing requires both personnel and is associated with a strict time window during which the service must be provided. We first present the 0-1 mixed integer programming formulation of the problem. Since the arising VRP is NP-hard, we then develop a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithm to solve it. Next, we randomly generate a set of small-sized instances based on Solomon's benchmark problems for the VRP with Time-Windows and solve them using IBM ILOG CPLEX. To test the effectiveness of the VNS algorithm, we compare these solutions to those achieved by VNS. Our preliminary experiments show that VNS is able to find good results fast, yet the HCC crew constraints may complicate the problem.

[1]  Richard F. Hartl,et al.  A Variable Neighborhood Search for the Multi Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows , 2004, J. Heuristics.

[2]  Michel Gendreau,et al.  Using Constraint-Based Operators to Solve the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows , 2002, J. Heuristics.

[3]  Jesper Larsen,et al.  The Home Care Crew Scheduling Problem: Preference-based visit clustering and temporal dependencies , 2012, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[4]  Maria Grazia Scutellà,et al.  Joint Assignment, Scheduling, and Routing Models to Home Care Optimization: A Pattern-Based Approach , 2015, Transp. Sci..

[5]  Christian Bierwirth,et al.  The home health care routing and scheduling problem with interdependent services , 2014, Health care management science.

[6]  David M. Miller,et al.  An Integrated Spatial DSS for Scheduling and Routing Home-Health-Care Nurses , 1997 .

[7]  Marius M. Solomon,et al.  Algorithms for the Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problems with Time Window Constraints , 1987, Oper. Res..

[8]  Mikael Rönnqvist,et al.  Laps Care - an operational system for staff planning of home care , 2006, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[9]  Andrea Matta,et al.  Human Resource Scheduling and Routing Problems in Home Health Care Context: A Literature Review , 2012 .

[10]  Jean-Charles Billaut,et al.  Home health care problem: An extended multiple Traveling Salesman Problem , 2009 .

[11]  Duc-Cuong Dang,et al.  A Simulated Annealing Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Synchronization Constraints , 2013, LION.

[12]  Torsten Fahle,et al.  A hybrid setup for a hybrid scenario: combining heuristics for the home health care problem , 2006, Comput. Oper. Res..

[13]  Olli Bräysy,et al.  A Reactive Variable Neighborhood Search for the Vehicle-Routing Problem with Time Windows , 2003, INFORMS J. Comput..

[14]  Nacima Labadie,et al.  Iterated Local Search for a Vehicle Routing Problem with Synchronization Constraints , 2014, ICORES.

[15]  Hanane Allaoua,et al.  A matheuristic approach for solving a home health care problem , 2013, Electron. Notes Discret. Math..

[16]  Pierre Hansen,et al.  Variable Neighborhood Search , 2018, Handbook of Heuristics.

[17]  Richard F. Hartl,et al.  Adaptive large neighborhood search for service technician routing and scheduling problems , 2012, J. Sched..