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

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.

@article{Haitam2021,
  title     = {A Vehicle Routing Problem for the Collection of Medical Samples at Home: Case Study of Morocco},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {4},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Ettazi Haitam and Rafalia Najat and Jaafar Abouchabaka},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120443},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120443}
}