Crew constrained home care routing problem with time windows

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SSCI.2015.244

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.