Comparative Study between a Mathematical Model and the BRKGA, RKO and Clustering-BRKGA Heuristic Methods for the Home Care Problem

This article studies the Home Health Care Service problem, which involves visits made by medical teams to people in need of care who, for some reason, are unable to go to a hospital, however, these visits depend on a series of technical requirements. The article presents an exact formulation from the literature, as well as heuristic methods such as RKO, recently proposed and applied here for the first time in this context, BRKGA, previously applied to the problem, in addition, the new Clustering-BRKGA method was introduced, which incorporates a clustering strategy into BRKGA in order to improve its performance on complex data sets. The results show that the approaches are effective in obtaining quality solutions, especially for large instances. The new Clustering-BRKGA method showed superior performance on larger instances.