Randomized and Generated Instances Fitting with the Home Health Care Problem Subjected to Certain Constraints

Abstract

Home Health Care (HHC) is a worldwide issue. It focuses on how medical and social organizations of different countries handle providing patients with health support at home. In most developed countries, reducing hospital cost constitutes a main objective. It is important to research the improvement of HHC logistics. This paper addressed the generation and development of a benchmark properly fitting different constraints of the HCC problem. Consequently, a generator was proposed dealing with all kinds of constraints such as time window constraints, workload constraints, synchronization, and precedence constraints. This generator allows researchers to validate and compare solving methods on a common dataset regardless of confidentiality issues. We validated our generator by firstly creating a common benchmark available for researchers and secondly by proposing a set of instances and a solving method based on an HHC problem found in the literature.