Joint Optimization of Service Routing and Scheduling in Home Health Care

Yi Zhang; Zhenzhen Zhang

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arXiv · 2505.20474

Joint Optimization of Service Routing and Scheduling in Home Health Care

Yi Zhang·Zhenzhen Zhang

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Abstract

The growing aging population has significantly increased demand for efficient home health care (HHC) services. This study introduces a Vehicle Routing and Appointment Scheduling Problem (VRASP) to simultaneously optimize caregiver routes and appointment times, minimizing costs while improving service quality. We first develop a deterministic VRASP model and then extend it to a stochastic version using sample average approximation to account for travel and service time uncertainty. A tailored Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) heuristic is proposed, combining regret-based insertion and Tabu Search to efficiently solve both problem variants. Computational experiments show that the stochastic model outperforms the deterministic approach, while VNS achieves near-optimal solutions for small instances and demonstrates superior scalability for larger problems compared to CPLEX. This work provides HHC providers with a practical decision-making tool to enhance operational efficiency under uncertainty.

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BibTeX RIS

Yi Zhang, Zhenzhen Zhang. 2025-05-26. Joint Optimization of Service Routing and Scheduling in Home Health Care. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20474

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