Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem in Home Healthcare Enhanced By Elitism of ACO Using Neighborhood Structures

Abstract

Increase in ageing population and chronic diseases among the people create a huge demand for Home Healthcare (HHC) in recent years. HHC is a service delivery system that provides the service at the patient's home by the set of professional caregivers. Vehicle routing problem is an everyday challenging task for HHC operational team. Continuity of care is regarding the sustainability of caregivers. It is achieved by implementing a feasible routing plan of caregivers within their respective time horizon. This environment creates a necessity to apply metaheuristic or heuristic algorithms in HHC. In this paper, we proposed bi-objective to minimize both total travel time and idle time of heterogeneous capacitated vehicle routing problem in HHC. It is solved by using Elitism of Ant colony optimization (E-ACO) further enhanced with neighbourhood structures. This proposed algorithm has never been applied in the literature of HHC. Finally, compare the efficiency of E-ACO with ACO and PSO using randomly generated test instances for 100 nodes and achieved the desired output.