The vehicle routing problem in home health care services: A case study in Ho Chi Minh city

Abstract

Home Health Care (HHC) services include the delivery to customers for many kind of tasks such as medical, nursing or homecare directly to their home. The Vehicle Routing Problem in Home Health Care Services (VRPHHCS) has become one of the major consideration for many HHC service providers in today’s competitive market. They have to serve customers in the most effective way, considering the on time and cost saving. This thesis enlarges the VRPHHCS for mother and newborn by developing a mathematical model in order to minimize all caregivers’ travel distance but still meet the balanced workload, satisfy clients’ requirement and afford caregivers’ lunch break. The minimum number of required caregivers is also considered as the objective. Due to the complexity of the proposed model and the large size of real dataset, another solution approach named Clustering Algorithm is used to come up with results in a reasonable computation time.