摘要：AbstractProviding sanitarian and medical treatments for patients in their location has lots of benefits. Having ordered and on-time medical services cause faster recovery for patients, besides reducing their expenditure. This study presents a new mathematical model for a multi-depot vehicle routing problem (VRP) with time windows for home health care firms. The multi-depot VRP tries to visit some patients and give necessary services to them by several vehicles settled at multiple depots. The endeavor of this problem is raising the satisfaction of patients while minimizing the distance and time of the traveling tour, the number of vehicles, and the transportation cost in a patient’s hard time windows. The problem is solved by genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The related results are compared with the GAMS outcomes for small-sized problems.
关键词：KeywordsHome health careMulti-depot vehicle routing problemMeta-heuristic algorithms
