Crew Constrained Home Health Care Routing Problem with Time Windows and Synchronized Visits

Population aging, rise in the prevalence of chronic diseases worldwide, and growing health care costs have substantially increased the demand for home health care (HHC) in recent years. To gain a competitive advantage in the market and lower public expenditure, HHC service providers and governmental institutions mainly focus on increasing service quality while decreasing their costs. These objectives have resulted in various challenging optimization problems that have been widely studied in the past few years, including routing and scheduling problems. In this paper, we study an HHC routing and scheduling problem with time windows, where service is provided to patients requesting different types of care using a limited crew. We first provide the mixed integer programming formulation of the problem. Then, we perform a computational study to investigate the benefits of allowing synchronized visits to patients. Our results show that synchronized visits guarantee HCC service to all patients in some instances which are otherwise infeasible, and may reduce the total travel distance in other cases.