Meta-Heuristic Algorithms for Multi-Objective Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem Considering Time Windows and Workload Balance of Nurses

Home Healthcare provides a wide range of home care services from prevention to rehabilitation and primary care to professional nursing services. This research presents a two-objective mathematical model based on the mixed integer linear programming approach for the home healthcare routing and scheduling problem (HHCRSP) with the objectives of minimization the nurses’ travel costs and the maximal working time difference among nurses. Considering the multimodal transportation, several initial health centers and one final health center and patient and nurse time windows are important features of the studied mathematical model. Small-sized problems have solved by using the Ɛ-constraint method on GAMS software. Also, due to the NP-hardness of the problem, MOPSO and NSGA-II algorithms have used to solve the medium and large-sized problems. The statistical results showed that the NSGA-II performed better than the MOPSO for medium and large sizes of problems in both MID and NOS performance metrics. Overall, Results of the performance metrics on different sizes of problems indicate the efficient and effective performance of NSGA-II in solving the understudied problem.