A biased-randomized heuristic for the home healthcare routing problem

Abstract

The home healthcare routing problem (HHRP) refers to the problem of allocating and routing caregivers to care-dependent people at their homes. It has been mostly tackled in the literature as a rich vehicle routing problem with time windows. This paper proposes a biased-randomized heuristic, based on the well-known savings heuristic, to solve the HHRP. The algorithm is tested in small but real-case instances where patients’ visits may occur more than once a day and, in such cases, all the visits have to be performed by the same caregiver. The results show the algorithm provides good quality results in reasonably low computing times.