A bi-objective green home health care routing problem

Abstract

Home Health Care (HHC) is generally defined and considered as a set of nurses serving the patients at home by providing the required drugs and other HHC services (e.g. nursing, housekeeping and cleaning etc.). By increasing the life expectancy in the developed countries, the number of hospitals and requirement homes along with medical staffs have not been grown at the same rate. Accordingly, the demand of HHC services is growing, dramatically. According to the literature and the increasing of HHC usage in real world, less attention to environmental pollution or green emission of such systems has been reported. This motivates our attempt to contribute the issue of green HHC among the first studies by developing a bi-objective optimization model. To alleviate the drawbacks of existing solution methodologies in the literature, this work not only uses a number of modification and hybrid versions of recent and old metaheuristics but also develops four fast heuristics. An extensive comparative study confirms the superiority of fourth heuristic along with modification and hybridizing algorithms proposed when solving the large-scale problems as well as the performance of developed model has been evaluated through a set of sensitivity analyses.