Metaheuristics for solving a multimodal home-healthcare scheduling problem
We present a general framework for solving a real-world multimodal home-healthcare scheduling (MHS) problem from a major Austrian home-healthcare provider. The goal of MHS is to assign home-care staff to customers and determine efficient multimodal tours while considering staff and customer satisfac...
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Published in | Central European journal of operations research Vol. 23; no. 1; pp. 89 - 113 |
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Main Authors | , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Berlin/Heidelberg
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
01.03.2015
Springer Springer Nature B.V Springer Verlag |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | We present a general framework for solving a real-world multimodal home-healthcare scheduling (MHS) problem from a major Austrian home-healthcare provider. The goal of MHS is to assign home-care staff to customers and determine efficient multimodal tours while considering staff and customer satisfaction. Our approach is designed to be as problem-independent as possible, such that the resulting methods can be easily adapted to MHS setups of other home-healthcare providers. We chose a two-stage approach: in the first stage, we generate initial solutions either via constraint programming techniques or by a random procedure. During the second stage, the initial solutions are (iteratively) improved by applying one of four metaheuristics: variable neighborhood search, a memetic algorithm, scatter search and a simulated annealing hyper-heuristic. An extensive computational comparison shows that the approach is capable of solving real-world instances in reasonable time and produces valid solutions within only a few seconds. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 1435-246X 1613-9178 |
DOI: | 10.1007/s10100-013-0305-8 |