The Robust Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem of the Home Healthcare of Peritoneal Dialysis patients

Satisfying the healthcare needs of patients at home have many advantages in today’s world. Providing an orderly health services both decreases the costs and speeds up healing of patients. For instance by replacing hemodialysis with peritoneal dialysis which can be done at home, patients feel more comfortable and the medical expenses would be lower. In this paper a periodic robust vehicle routing mathematical model with simultaneous deliveries and pickups and soft time windows to serve peritoneal dialysis patients at home is developed. The model is built according to the issues and problems which are seen in dialysis center of Hasheminejad kidney center. It has been tried to consider realistic assumptions in the model design, such as the uncertainty in the travel time of the vehicle. Having the sensitiveness of providing timely healthcare service in mind, a method should be applied to face the uncertainty in time which guarantees minimum risk. Moreover, considering a cost term called “lost opportunity”, the presented robust model should not be too conservative and impose on huge unnecessary costs. Results show that the presented robust model at the worst condition or in other words at the maximum uncertainty level has no constraint violations. It means that by using this model the chance of providing timely health service would be enhanced.