A Green Routing and Scheduling Problem in Home Health Care

Abstract

The growing concern about the influences of anthropogenic pollutions has forced researchers and scholars to study the environmental concerns. This paper addresses a green routing and scheduling problem in home health care (HHC) with the constraints of synchronized visits and carbon emissions. In this work, the objective is to design a reasonable logistics route meanwhile reduce the effect on the environment for the HHC company. The formulated mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is solved for a set of small scale instances using Gurobi solver with a time limit of 1 hour. An efficient two-phase heuristic approach through decomposing the studied problem into a routing problem and a speed optimization problem is proposed. The heuristic approach is based on two exact methods using Gurobi solver and dynamic programming (DM) method. The proposed heuristic approach is examined by a total of 19 instances with different scales. The experimental results for the studied problem highlight the effectiveness and efciency of the proposed heuristic approach.