A heuristic for a multi-depot home health care routing and scheduling problem with multi-objective

With global population aging, medical demands have increased substantially over recent decades in many countries. Home health care services address this need by providing door-to-door service, greatly reducing the inconvenience of going out of old people. However, the geographic imbalance between demand and supply hinders the development of home care services. This work introduces an idea of collaborative service for the multi-depot home health care routing and scheduling problem. This strategy enables centralized scheduling of caregiver resource across all care centers, allowing customers in underserved regions to be served by caregivers from nearby centers and customers with multiple demands to be jointly served by necessary multiple centers. In order to study the addressed problem, a multiobjective optimization mathematical model considering the total operating cost and workload balance of the caregivers is firstly established; secondly, a hybrid greedy random adaptive search procedure (HGRASP) is designed by combining the greedy random adaptive search and iterative local search; finally, the performance of the designed HGRASP is evaluated by simulation experiments based on testing various instances. The experimental results shown that the multi-objective collaborative home health care routing and scheduling problem can be effectively and efficiently solved by the designed HGRASP, as compared to the well known NSGA-II algorithm for multi-objective optimization.