Developing new heuristics and hybrid meta-heuristics to address the bi-objective home health care problem

Nowadays, population aging is a problem many countries worldwide face to the degree that the world's aged population is currently at its highest level in human history. Obviously, the number of nurses, doctors, retirement homes, hospitals, and the resources necessary to provide good health care for this population must increase correspondingly. As the elderly population increases, so does the demand for home health care services. The main challenges service providers face are scheduling meetings, transportation of the nurses or patients, providing the required medicine to the pharmacies on time, the service's environmental effects, the service, the availability of the service, and more. In this paper, a bi-objective home health care problem considering both transportation costs and greenhouse gas emissions is investigated to diminish the shortcomings of previous studies. Contrary to the previous related works, especially to extend the solution approach based on AM Fathollahi-Fard (J Clean Prod 200:423-443, 2018a), some new ideas were presented to design ten new heuristics for the problem. Also, hybrid versions of recent and well-known metaheuristic algorithms address the problem. Finally, the proposed heuristics, metaheuristics, and hybrid metaheuristics are compared and analyzed, not only with the previously developed heuristics, but also among themselves, to evaluate their performances. The results illustrate the superiority of some of the proposed algorithms in most of the defined problems.