Improved MILP Formulation for Home Healthcare Scheduling and Routing with Multiple Depots
Issued Date
2026-01-01
Resource Type
eISSN
21844372
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-105035587496
Journal Title
International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems
Volume
1
Start Page
486
End Page
493
Rights Holder(s)
SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems Vol.1 (2026) , 486-493
Suggested Citation
Ogbodo I., Laesanklang W., Landa-Silva D. Improved MILP Formulation for Home Healthcare Scheduling and Routing with Multiple Depots. International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems Vol.1 (2026) , 486-493. 493. doi:10.5220/0014473200004055 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/123456789/116279
Title
Improved MILP Formulation for Home Healthcare Scheduling and Routing with Multiple Depots
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Author's Affiliation
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Abstract
Despite extensive research on home healthcare scheduling and routing problems (HHCSRP), a critical gap persists between mathematically optimal solutions and operationally feasible implementations. This paper demonstrates that constraints often considered redundant in vehicle routing formulations are essential for HHCSRP, where worker-depot assignments cannot be arbitrarily changed. We validate a widely cited multidepot HHCSRP MILP formulation using 42 real-world instances, revealing that 77.8% of optimal solutions contain operational violations, workers incorrectly assigned to arbitrary depots and unproductive direct depotto-depot routes without patient visits. Our main contribution is a refined formulation with explicit operational feasibility constraints that eliminate these violations, while improving computational efficiency on average by 40%. Comparative analysis using GUROBI and CPLEX solvers reveals instance-dependent performance patterns, with GUROBI achieving faster solving times for small to medium resource-constrained instances, and CPLEX producing superior solutions for large-scale, over-resourced problems. These findings underscore that operational validation must extend beyond standard optimisation metrics to verify real-world practicability, a persistent gap contributing to the scarcity of successful HHCSRP deployments in practice.