VNS methods for home care routing and scheduling problem with temporal dependencies, and multiple structures and specialties

The need for optimization in the Home Care Service is becoming more and more legitimate in the face of the increase of demand and cost all over the world. Recently, many researchers in the Operation Research community have been attracted by this issue, which presents interesting aspects related to the vehicle routing problems. In this paper, we consider a new variant called the vehicle routing problem with time windows, temporal dependencies (synchronization, precedence, and disjunction), multi-structures, and multispecialties problem (VRPTW-TD-2MS). This new variant is an extension of the vehicle routing problems with time windows and synchronization constraints (VRPTW-S) that is well-studied in literature. We present a Mixed Integer Programming method, and propose three Variable Neighborhood Search approaches. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of the General Variable Neighborhood Search with Ejection Chains-based local search for solving VRPTW-TD-2MS and VRPTW-S.