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.

Ettazi Haitam, Rafalia Najat and Jaafar Abouchabaka, “A Vehicle Routing Problem for the Collection of Medical Samples at Home: Case Study of Morocco” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 12(4), 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120443

@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},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120443},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120443},
year = {2021},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {12},
number = {4},
author = {Ettazi Haitam and Rafalia Najat and Jaafar Abouchabaka}
}