Solving Vehicle Routing Problem in Home Health CareUsing a Genetic Algorithm

This paper considers a vehicle scheduling problem encountered in home health carelogistics. The problem can be considered as a special vehicle routing problem withsimultaneous delivery and pickup and time windows, with four types of demands:delivery from depot to patient, delivery from a hospital to patient, pickup from a patientto depot and pickup from a patient to a medical lab. Each patient is visited by one vehicleand each vehicle visits each node at most once. Patients are associated with time windowsand vehicles with capacity. We propose a genetic algorithm to solve this problem. Theproposed approach is tested on test instances derived from existing VRPTW benchmarks.The results shows that the proposed algorithm is competitive when compared with thebest-known solutions in the literature