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

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