Simulated Annealing for the Home Healthcare Routing and Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Home healthcare services are carried out by trained caregivers who visit the patient’s home, perform their service operations that depend on the patient’s need (e.g., medical care or just instrumental activities of daily living), and then move to the next patient. We consider the home healthcare scheduling and routing problem, in the formulation proposed by Mankowska et al. (2014), which includes synchronization among services and time windows for patients. For this problem, we propose a local search approach based on a novel neighborhood operator and guided by the Simulated Annealing metaheuristic. We show that our approach, properly tuned in a statistically-principled way, is able to outperform state-of-the-art methods on most of the original instances made available by Mankowska et al.