Home health care and dialysis routing with electric vehicles and private and public charging stations

This paper studies a joint multi-depot home health care and dialysis problem of routing and scheduling decisions of health specialists. The fleet consists of electric vehicles, which use both public and private charging stations. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer linear programming model. We describe a hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm, which integrates construction heuristic to generate initial solution and local search procedure based on variable neighborhood descent. The hybrid ALNS successfully combines existing heuristic mechanisms and introduces several new problem-specific procedures to effectively handle the complex structure of the problem. We conduct experiments on realistic benchmark instances to investigate various problem specifications, such as constructed teams, usage rate of fast and super-fast charging technologies, and public and private charging options. We analyze the performance of the hybrid ALNS and its mechanisms. The algorithm obtained good quality results on the complex optimization problem.