Journal
CENTRAL EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH
Volume 23, Issue 1, Pages 89-113Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10100-013-0305-8
Keywords
Home health care; Vehicle routing; Optimization; Metaheuristics
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Funding
- Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) within the strategic programme I2VSplus [826153]
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We present a general framework for solving a real-world multimodal home-healthcare scheduling (MHS) problem from a major Austrian home-healthcare provider. The goal of MHS is to assign home-care staff to customers and determine efficient multimodal tours while considering staff and customer satisfaction. Our approach is designed to be as problem-independent as possible, such that the resulting methods can be easily adapted to MHS setups of other home-healthcare providers. We chose a two-stage approach: in the first stage, we generate initial solutions either via constraint programming techniques or by a random procedure. During the second stage, the initial solutions are (iteratively) improved by applying one of four metaheuristics: variable neighborhood search, a memetic algorithm, scatter search and a simulated annealing hyper-heuristic. An extensive computational comparison shows that the approach is capable of solving real-world instances in reasonable time and produces valid solutions within only a few seconds.
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