Heuristics to Solve a Real-World Asymmetric Vehicle Routing Problem with Side Constraints

Abstract

To maintain patients at home as most as possible, healthcare services are nowadays quite diversified. We present the case of a public medical clinic offering activities, mostly to the elderly, at a daycare center. Users are brought into the daycare center by bus or by taxi. The global problem consists in defining routes to pick up users while assigning them to time slots in the week. At first sight this problem could be viewed as an asymmetric multiple vehicle routing problem. However many additional constraints must be considered. In this paper, we propose 2 approaches: the first one is the combination of sweep algorithm and negotiation heuristic, and the second one is a modified version of the saving heuristic. These two algorithms are tested on 10 problem instances. Experimental results and their comparison are presented.