[Zurück]

G. Hiermann, M. Prandtstetter, A. Rendl, J. Puchinger, G. Raidl:
"Metaheuristics for solving a multimodal home-healthcare scheduling problem";
Central European Journal of Operations Research, May 2013 (2013).

We present a general framework for solving a real-world multimodal
home-healthcare scheduling (MHS) problem from a major Austrian home-healthcare
provider. The goal ofMHSis to assign home-care staff to customers and determine efficient
multimodal tours while considering staff and customer satisfaction. Our approach
is designed to be as problem-independent as possible, such that the resulting methods
can be easily adapted to MHS setups of other home-healthcare providers. We chose
a two-stage approach: in the first stage, we generate initial solutions either via constraint
programming techniques or by a random procedure. During the second stage,
the initial solutions are (iteratively) improved by applying one of four metaheuristics:
variable neighborhood search, a memetic algorithm, scatter search and a simulated
annealing hyper-heuristic. An extensive computational comparison shows that the
approach is capable of solving real-world instances in reasonable time and produces
valid solutions within only a few seconds.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10100-013-0305-8

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_221673.pdf