A Home Health Care Routing Problem with Stochastic Travel and Service Time

Abstract

Home Health Care (HHC) companies are widespread in European countries, and aim to serve patients at home to help them recover from illness and injury in a personal environment. Since transportation costs constitute one of the largest forms of expenditure in the Home Health Care industry, it is of importance to research the optimization of the Home Health Care logistics. This paper considers a Home Health Care Routing Problem with stochastic travel and service time, which comes from the logistics practice of the home health care company. A stochastic programming model with recourse (SPR) is proposed, the Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA) and stochastic simulation method are integrated to solve the proposed model. Three series of experiments are carried out to evaluate the model. Firstly, the SPR model is reduced to the deterministic one, experimental results for the related instances validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed HGA. Then HGA and stochastic simulation are integrated to solve the stochastic model. Comparisons between the solutions obtained by stochastic model and deterministic one validate the reasonable and robustness of considering the stochastic travel and service time. This research will help HHC companies to make appropriate decisions when arranging their vehicle routes.