Application Of Vehicle Routing Problem And Scheduling For Regular Healthcare System: The Case Of Senior Healthcare In Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

This paper studies the vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time constraints for the regular health care system that provides healthcare at residence for the elderly. The objective of this study is to optimize workforce assignment and satisfy patients’ time requirements by minimizing the operation time and workforce usage. The workforces are mobile clinic vehicles that visit the patients and are based at one depot. The vehicles start daily trips at a hospital depot, travel to locations with demand to perform examinations, and return to the depot within a working day. The model has four processes: route generation, route scoring and selection, planning generation, and planning improvement. The model uses a simulated annealing process to generate route sets, a score-based system to select routes, a distance-based system to decide the planning order, and a genetic algorithm with uniform crossover and one-point crossover is used to find improvement in the total operation time. Benchmark and generated data are used as inputs. The shortest total operation time recorded is 26,955.5 minutes and 16,962.82 minutes for benchmark and generated data, respectively. The average improvement the genetic algorithm has on the benchmark result is 1.097% but none for the generated data. Extensions on traveling limits and different order planning methods are discussed in the generated data section. The normal order and descending distance methods perform similarly. The travelling limit generates the best at 100 minutes per route, which improves the result by 0.85%. Further research is needed to evaluate the economical value of the model.