The home health care problem with working regulations

Due to the geographically dispersed locations of their clients, home health care providers have to perform a complex routing and scheduling task. Besides the well-researched routing problem, the adherence to legal and organizational working regulations is a basis for application in practice. These requirements are already widely incorporated in the nurse rostering problem for stationary institutions, but also have to be considered while generating routes for home care providers. We introduce new and adapted working regulations to the home health care problem. The mixed-integer formulation is adaptable to the requirements of different providers. Our numerical results show that an exact solution approach is noncompetitive with respect to computing time in most cases. We therefore propose a heuristic approach based on an adaptive large neighborhood search to cope with the complexity of the problem. The numerical results are computed on generated but realistic instances as well as on data sets provided in previous publications. The results show that the heuristic achieves good results in comparison to the mixed-integer program in only a portion of the computation time. Additional to a numerical analysis, we investigate the influence of the working regulations on the solutions which indicates the importance of modeling working regulations. If the regulations are neglected, a high number of violations are caused.