Tabu Search with Variable Neighborhood Search Algorithm for Home Healthcare Routing Problem for Multiple Hospitals with Balanced Workload

Abstract

In this paper, we study home healthcare routing and scheduling problem where multiple hospitals serve patients. In the public hospitals in healthcare system of Türkiye, patients requiring home healthcare are assigned to the hospital that serves their place of residence. This can cause the workload of hospitals to become unbalanced in terms of the time needed for both traveling and operation. The aim of this paper is to generate routes with a balanced workload for hospitals, giving consideration to the time windows of patients and the working hours of health workers. Firstly, we construct a mathematical model which can solve toy and small-scale problems whilst taking into account the importance of a balanced workload. Then, a Tabu Search with a Variable Neighborhood Search (TS-VNS) algorithm is developed to solve large-scale problems. The performance of the TS-VNS algorithm is tested by comparing the results of the mathematical model with the generated test problems at a small scale. Additionally, large-scale test problems from the literature are sourced for the problem and solved by the TS-VNS algorithm. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the TS-VNS algorithm.