Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
INFORMS Annual Meeting 2024, Washington, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, 20 - 23 Ekim 2024, ss.1187-1188
The home healthcare system is crucial especially for elderly, disabled people or those who are facing challenges in accessing healthcare services. Furthermore, extraordinary situations, such as pandemics, increase the importance of home healthcare services. Access to traditional healthcare is restricted as lockdowns make it impossible for people to leave their homes. Therefore, home healthcare system plays a critical role in facilitating access to healthcare services during these challenging times. Considering all these situations, this study focuses on the medication delivery problem in the home healthcare system. In this problem, multiple pharmacies situated in various locations can meet the medication demands of patients. In addition, while some patients' medication demands must be satisfied by specific pharmacies, others' medication demands can be met by any pharmacy. In this case, considering the service constraints, medication delivery must be completed within the specified time limit using the vehicles available at the pharmacies. Therefore, it is necessary to obtain optimal routes to minimize the total distance traveled by vehicles from different pharmacies. The problem encountered in medication delivery is addressed as the Multi-Depot General Colored Traveling Salesman Problem (MD-GCTSP). A mixed-integer mathematical model was developed to obtain an optimal solution for the MD-GCTSP. Furthermore, a metaheuristic algorithm was used to get quality solutions with short computing times for large-sized problems. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated on different-sized test problems. Computational results show that the proposed solution approaches are efficient and well-suited for solving the MD-GCTSP.