Home health care and dialysis routing with electric vehicles and private and public charging stations

ABSTRACT

This paper studies a joint multi-depot home health care and dialysis problem of routing and scheduling decisions of health specialists. The fleet consists of electric vehicles, which use both public and private charging stations. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer linear programming model. We describe a hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm, which integrates construction heuristic to generate initial solution and local search procedure based on variable neighborhood descent. The hybrid ALNS successfully combines existing heuristic mechanisms and introduces several new problem-specific procedures to effectively handle the complex structure of the problem. We conduct experiments on realistic benchmark instances to investigate various problem specifications, such as constructed teams, usage rate of fast and super-fast charging technologies, and public and private charging options. We analyze the performance of the hybrid ALNS and its mechanisms. The algorithm obtained good quality results on the complex optimization problem.

KEYWORDS:

• Vehicle routing
• home health care and dialysis
• electric vehicles
• adaptive large neighborhood search
• local search

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to the two referees for valuable comments on previous versions of this paper. This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) under grant number 119M007. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştirma Kurumu [119M007].