IACS-HCSP: Improved ant colony optimization for large-scale home care scheduling problems

The home care and scheduling problem (HCSP) consists on the design of a set of routes to be used by caregivers that provide daily assistance at specific times to patients located in a definite geographic area. In this study we propose a modified version of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), called IACS-HCSP, to approach this task. In order to be used in this problem, ACO requires modifications in the problem representation and additional mechanisms...