Optimization Approaches for a Home Healthcare Routing and Scheduling Problem

Welfare community projects, mainly related to health care, are essential for the development of societies. For this reason, the optimization of its resources through methodologies that support decision making becomes of interest for all stakeholders in order to reach the target users. In Colombia, particularly in the city of Medellin, several social projects are being developed seeking to provide health and other social services to vulnerable populations. The purpose of this chapter is to deal with a real application of the home health care routing and scheduling problem (HHCRSP), in which a set of health professionals grouped by teams should visit a set of users geographically scatter over the city. Here, it is proposed a mixed integer linear model and a heuristic solution approach. The mathematical model is based on vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries (VRPPD) with additional features related with the specific application and geographical conditions.