General variable neighborhood search for home healthcare routing and scheduling problem with time windows and synchronized visits

Abstract

Home healthcare centers are facing increasing demands and researchers are attracted by the related routing and scheduling issue that is presented in literature as a VRP with synchronization and time windows constraints. The goal is to optimize the assignment of visits to home caregivers and the sequence of visits execution. In this paper, a General Variable Neighborhood Search is provided. Experiments conducted on benchmark instances from the literature clearly show that our method is fast and outperforms the existing approaches on half of the instances.