A Multi Period Routing and Scheduling optimization Model for Home health Care Problem

Home health care services have a key importance in modern societies. Most organizations working in this area in Iran use the traditional procedure to plan and manage medical staff and determine the arrangement of visiting patients. This procedure often increases costs and reduces the satisfaction of patients. In this paper, a multi-period routing and scheduling model is proposed in order to visit patients and provide them medical services. Considering both dependency and independence of a patient's visits with each other, assuming the model as multi-depot as well as multi period are some innovations of this study. The main purpose of the proposed model is to reduce total costs of home health care organization. Model has been solved in small scale by GAMS software. To solve the model in large scale, developed Variable neighborhood search is proposed and compared with simulated annealing algorithm and ant colony system. Results show that costs are decreased and the proposed algorithm has better performance