Heterogeneous vehicle routing problems with synchronization ::application to homecare scheduling routing problem

Home healthcare and home care depots are facing increasing demands and costs all over the world, because the increase of the number of dependent people that constitutes an important percentage of population and the growing necessity of some patients with special needs for support. Researchers are attracted by this issue that presents interesting customized scheduling and routing aspects. The objective is to optimize the assignment of visits to home caregivers and the sequence of visits execution. In reality, lunch break for caregivers is mandatory and heterogeneous fleet of vehicles are considered to services the patients. Thus, we introduce in this paper a new variant by taking into account breaks and heterogeneous fleet vehicles in addition to time windows and synchronization constraints. We call this specific problem as the Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem with Synchronisation visit and Break (HVRPSB). We provided an Adaptive Large Neighboorhood search to solve this new variant. Numerical results on generated instances are provided to show the effectiveness of our developed algorithm to solve the HVRPSB