A compact model for the home healthcare routing and scheduling problem

Home healthcare has become more and more central in the last decades, due to the advantages it can bring to both healthcare institutions and patients. Planning activities in this context, however, presents significant challenges related to route planning and mutual synchronization of caregivers. In this paper we propose a new compact model for the combined optimization of scheduling (of the activities) and routing (of the caregivers) characterized by fewer variables and constraints when compared with the models previously available in the literature. The new model is solved by a constraint programming solver and compared experimentally with the exact and metaheuristic approaches available in the literature on the common datasets adopted by the community. The results show that the new model provides improved lower bounds for the vast majority of the instances, while producing at the same time high quality heuristic solutions, comparable to those of tailored metaheuristics, for small/medium size instances.