A biased random‐key genetic algorithm for the home health care problem

Home health care problems consist in scheduling visits to home patients by professionals while following a series of requirements. This paper studies the Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem, which comprises multi-attribute vehicle routing problem with soft time windows. Additional route inter-dependency constraints apply for requesting multiple visits, either simultaneous or precedence. We mathematical programming solver obtain lower bounds problem. also propose biased random-key genetic algorithm, we study effects additional state-of-the-art components recently proposed literature this algorithm. perform computational experiment using publicly available benchmark dataset. Regarding previous local search-based methods, find results up 26.1% better than those literature. improvements from around 0.4% 6.36% compared similar