A two-phase approach for periodic home health care planning

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of periodic vehicle routing encountered in Home Health Care (HHC). The problem can be considered as a Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (PVRPTW). It consists in establishing a planning of visits to patients over a given time horizon so as to satisfy the adherence to the care plan while optimizing the routes used in each time period. One two-stage mathematical formulation of this problem is proposed. We then propose a Tabu Search (TS) and a MIP-based Neighborhood Search method to compute the weekly and daily plan, respectively. These approaches are tested on large size instances.