Multi-period home health care routing and scheduling problem with the medical grouping of patients

Home health care service has significant importance in modern societies. In most of the active institutions in this field, the traditional procedure is used for planning and managing health personnel and determining patient visit sequence. This procedure usually causes an increase in costs and reduces patients’ satisfaction. This paper, for the first time, groups the patients in a model according to the level of emergency and discriminating in their examination. Considering dependency and independence of patient visits to each other, assuming multi-depot and multi-period issues are attractive aspects of the proposed model. The model is solved with GAMS software for small scale and two variable neighborhood search algorithm and simulated annealing algorithm are used to solve large scale problems and their performances are compared. The results indicate minimizing total cost and also increasing patients` satisfaction by the proposed model.