Towards sustainable Home (Health)-Care: Bi-objective formulation for Electric Vehicle Routing

The growing life expectancy in developed nations has led to an increased demand for Home (Health)-Care services due to the imbalanced growth rate between hospitals, residential care facilities and medical staff. Home (Health)-Care centers face several practical challenges related to the route such as its fees, duration, distance and ecological impact, etc. This drives our efforts to addresses the operational challenges in routing and scheduling problem considering multi-dimensional aspects simultaneously (social, economic and environmental). We propose a bi-objective Green Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, Temporal Dependency, Multiple Structures and Multiple Specialties “Bi-GVRPTW-TD-2MS” model. This model aims to minimize patients’ dissatisfaction degree towards caregivers and reduce the overall travel distances of Electric Vehicles “EVs”. It incorporates the potential for recharging at any of the available charging stations through a suitable recharging strategy. This new variant extends the literature on the “VRPTW-TD-2MS” problem, which is studied as a mono-objective function with only a focus on the economic aspect. We present computational results using the Cplex solver for small-scale instances and introduce the Random General Variable Neighborhood Search “RGVNS” metaheuristic for medium and large-scale instances. The superiority of our approach over the existing methods applied to the VRPTW-TD-2MS model, is demonstrated through a comparative study. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the RGVNS method in solving both the Bi-GVRPTW-TD-2MS and VRPTW-TD-2MS problems.