Heuristic approaches for a special simultaneous pickup and delivery problem with time windows in home health care industry

Abstract

This paper addresses a problem encountered in home health care logistics in France. The home health care company must complete pickup and delivery tasks to satisfy the demands of clients (the patients receive home health care). The requirements can be partitioned into four types: delivering medicines from the company's depot or hospital to patients' home, and picking up materials from patients' home to the lab or return to the company's depot. Each patient may require various pickup services and various delivery services, simultaneously. Meanwhile, there are time window constraints for lab, hospital and each patient. The objective is to determine a set of vehicle routes with minimal costs, satisfying all the constraints. We build two mathematical formulations for this complex problem, and propose heuristic approaches to solve this problem. Computational experiments on some test instances are presented.