The Stochastic Home Health Care Routing Problem in Dense Communities with Multi-Appointment

The Stochastic Home Health Care Scheduling and Routing Problem refers to a decision process that allocates a group of nurses to a group of elders, with considerations of both stochastic and deterministic constraints. This paper studies the SHHCSRP in dense communities, where traveling distance is shortened and waiting cost is possibly higher. Other constraints considered in this paper include multi-appointment, mixed time window and skill-demand matching. A chance constrained programming model is built to formulate the problem, and a heuristic based on the Best-Worst Ant Colony Optimization is developed to solve it. A medium scale instance is experimented, and it turns out that, 1) sequences of nurses have a significant impact on the solution, 2) waiting limitation should be well-adjusted to balance the waiting time and total workload.