A Vehicle Routing Problem for the Collection of Medical Samples at Home: Case Study of Morocco

Abstract

This paper aims to solve the problem of sampling and collecting blood and/ or urine tubes from sick people at home via a medical staff (nurse/ caregiver) to the laboratory in an optimal way. To ensure good management, several constraints must be taken into account, namely: staff schedules, patient preferences, the maximum delay time for a blood sample, etc. This problem is considered as a vehicle routing problem with time windows, preference and priority according to urgent cases. We first proposed a mathematical formulation of the problem by using a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) as well as various metaheuristics. Also, we applied this method to a real instance of a laboratory in Morocco (Témara) named Laboratory BioGuich, which gave the most optimal results.