# A biased random-key genetic algorithm for the home health care problem

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14347 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14347/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Exact algorithms and heuristics for capacitated covering salesman problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06995/) (2024)
- [Random-key genetic algorithms: Principles and applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02120/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Home health care problems consist of scheduling visits to home patients by health professionals while following a series of requirements. This paper studies the Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem, which comprises a multi-attribute vehicle routing problem with soft time windows. Additional route inter-dependency constraints apply for patients requesting multiple visits, either by simultaneous visits or visits with precedence. We apply a mathematical programming solver to obtain lower bounds for the problem. We also propose a biased random-key genetic algorithm, and we study the effects of additional state-of-art components recently proposed in the literature for this genetic algorithm. We perform computational experiment using a publicly available benchmark dataset. Regarding the previous local search-based methods, we find results up to 26.1% better than those of the literature. We find improvements from around 0.4% to 6.36% compared to previous results from a similar genetic algorithm.