Metaheuristic-based approaches for the multi-centre open home healthcare routing problem

This paper presents the multi-centre open home healthcare (MC-OHHC) problem with time windows and synchronisation constraints. The MC-OHHC can be described as the problem of designing least cost routes from several centres to a set of visits, without forcing them to return to the centres. Some services require simultaneous visits by using different routes to be accomplished. The contribution of the paper is three-fold: 1) it presents the corresponding mathematical linear model; 2) it gives the results related to the CPLEX resolution and an adapted constructive heuristic solution of such a problem; 3) it provides the results related to a variable neighborhood descent algorithm, a simulating annealing algorithm and a hybrid genetic algorithm. Computational results on adapted set of benchmark instances from the literature are reported and showed that our proposed approaches are fast, efficient and competitive compared to the solutions provided by the CPLEX software. Some optimal solutions are provided in short computational times, and greatly improve the initial solutions obtained by the proposed efficient constructive method.