The Multi-Period Electric Home Healthcare Routeing and Scheduling Problem With Nonlinear Charging

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) offer ideal opportunities to reduce the negative effects of transport. Demographic changes have led to an increase in the demand for home healthcare services and the transporting of healthcare staff. This paper is an attempt to introduce and address the multi-period electric home healthcare routeing and scheduling problem with nonlinear charging (E-HHCRSP-NL) to handle decisions such as allocating the EVs used by healthcare staff for clients based on their characteristics, determining the EV routes, tracking their charge state, and choosing the most convenient charging locations. The problem is solved using a newly developed hybrid evolutionary variable neighbourhood search algorithm (HE-VNS). The computational results of the newly created instances indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.