The multi-period home health care routing and scheduling problem with electric vehicles

This paper studies the multi-period home healthcare routing and scheduling problem with homogeneous electric vehicles and time windows. The problem aims to construct the weekly routes of healthcare nurses so as to provide a service to the patients located at a scattered geographic area. Some patients may require to be visited more than once in the same workday day and/or in the same workweek. We consider three charging technologies; normal, fast, and super-fast. The vehicles might be charged during the working day at a charging station or at the end of the working day at the depot. The objective is to minimize the total cost of utilizing healthcare nurse, unit energy cost of using charger technology, fixed cost of utilizing a transfer service, and cost of rejecting a patient. We formulate a mathematical model and develop an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic that has been efficiently crafted to handle specific problem features. We conduct extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances to assess the competitiveness of the heuristic and to deeply analyze the problem.