A unified formulation for home healthcare routing and scheduling problems

Home Healthcare is an essential component of healthcare systems, where caregivers visit patients' homes to deliver services. While presenting advantages with respect to institutional care, such as being cost-effective and alleviating family burdens, it presents challenges in scheduling and routing caregivers efficiently. While various formulations of such a problem—the home healthcare routing and scheduling problem—have been proposed, many fail to include key real-world features, limiting their applicability in practice. This paper consolidates relevant features from existing models and significantly extends the formulation by Mankowska et al. (2014) to develop a unified framework incorporating as many real-world aspects as possible. We introduce a new instance generator, a set of real-world features to describe these instances, and a comprehensive infrastructure for validating and comparing solutions. Furthermore, we extend two state-of-the-art solution methods—simulated annealing and one based on a compact mixed integer linear programming model solved by a state-of-the-art software – to integrate all these features and provide a comparative analysis of their performance. Results show that our general solution methods are able to outperform methods specialized for a specific formulation on many instances.