Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem for Home HemoDialysis Care

In this paper we address a particular issue dealing with the delivery of commodities related to HemoDialysis (HD) to patients at home with limited holding capacity. The aim is to optimize the visit frequency to patients and to construct vehicle tours simultaneously, in order to find the best compromise between the patients' inventory holding and traveling costs. Therefore, we introduce a new Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model based on special needs of home patient hemodialysis. In order to display the interest of flexibility ensured by our model, we compare two scenarios, a first one with fixed visit frequency and another one treating the visit frequency as a decision variable. Computational experiments are conducted on some instances taken from literature. The obtained results show that the scenario which treats the visit frequency as a decision variable is more interesting, and the patients storage cost in the objective function can impact considerably these results.