Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem Considering Temporal Dependencies and Perishability with Simultaneous Pickup and Delivery

Home health care (HHC) companies provide a wide range of medical and social services to patients in their own homes to help them rehabilitate after illness or injury. Providing high-quality services and reducing operating costs are accessible through proper planning of different sectors of HHC companies. This study presents a mathematical model integrated with real-life constraints to address a home health care routing and scheduling problem (HHCRSP). The planning takes into account temporal precedence and synchronization constraints and limited allowable times for transferring collected biological samples to the laboratory in the pickup and delivery environment. This problem is a new variant of the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) with the aim of minimizing the cost related to the transportation and the idle time of caregivers by assigning proper caregivers with required qualifications to patients based on their disjunctive needs. Simulated annealing (SA) and tabu search (TS) are two meta-heuristics applied in two phases for each instance to schedule primary tasks in the first step, and then synchronized services in the next phase. The Solomon’s benchmark is used for generating comparative experiments.