Vehicle routing with time windows
Operations Research
A new optimization algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows
Operations Research
Identification of robust scheduling heuristics: application of Taguchi methods in simulation studies
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Computers and Operations Research
An overview of a heuristic for vehicle routing problem with time windows
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Development of a workforce management system for a customer hotline service
Computers and Operations Research
Parameter Selection in Particle Swarm Optimization
EP '98 Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Evolutionary Programming VII
The particle swarm optimization algorithm: convergence analysis and parameter selection
Information Processing Letters
MACS-VRPTW: A Multiple Ant Colony System for Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Windows
MACS-VRPTW: A Multiple Ant Colony System for Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Windows
Efficient trip generation with a rule modeling system for crew scheduling problems
Journal of Systems and Software
Fuzzy Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization for Solving Traveling Salesman Problem
CIT '04 Proceedings of the The Fourth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology
Evolutionary Algorithms for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows
Journal of Heuristics
An effective hybrid optimization approach for multi-objective flexible job-shop scheduling problems
Computers and Industrial Engineering
A cooperative parallel meta-heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with time windows
Computers and Operations Research
Particle Swarn Optimization with Fast Local Search for the Blind Traveling Salesman Problem
HIS '05 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems
Computers and Operations Research
A discrete version of particle swarm optimization for flowshop scheduling problems
Computers and Operations Research
Future Generation Computer Systems
Self Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization for Efficient Virtual Machine Provisioning in Cloud
International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies
Operations management applied to home care services: Analysis of the districting problem
Decision Support Systems
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This paper presents the novel application of a collaborative population-based meta-heuristic technique called Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to the scheduling of home care workers. The technique is applied to a genuine situation arising in the UK, where the provision of community care service is a responsibility of the local authorities. Within this provision, optimization routes for each care worker are determined in order to minimize the distance traveled providing that the capacity and service time window constraints are not violated. The objectives of this paper are twofold; first to exploit a systematic approach to improve the existing schedule of home care workers, second to develop the methodology to enable the continuous PSO algorithm to be efficiently applied to this type of problem and all classes of similar problems. For this problem, a particle is defined as a multi-dimensional point in space which represents the corresponding care activities and assignment priority. The Heuristic Assignment scheme is specially designed to transform the continuous PSO algorithm to the discrete job schedule. The Earliest Start Time Priority with Minimum Distance Assignment (ESTPMDA) technique is developed for generating an initial solution which guides the search direction of the particle. Local improvement procedures (LIP), i.e. insertion and swap, are embedded in the PSO algorithm in order to further improve the solution quality. The proposed methodology is implemented, tested, and compared with existing solutions on a variety of real problem instances.