Home Chemotherapy Planning: An Integrated Production Scheduling and Multi-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem

Home chemotherapy systems allow the administration of cancer treatments at a patient’s residence, avoiding an admission to inpatient care facilities. This innovative health care model is interesting both economically and on a human level. It also raises several logistical challenges. This paper focuses on one of the optimization problems arising in the context of home chemotherapy services, where a complex scheduling problem underlies the operational planning process. Indeed, some injectable chemotherapy drugs may remain stable only during a few hours after being produced. Consequently, their production must be carefully scheduled jointly with their administration, which takes place at the patients’ homes during a predefined time window. This gives rise to an integrated production scheduling and vehicle routing problem, that we address using a large neighborhood search approach. Production and administration sequences are iteratively modified, while a linear program is used to determine optimal production and administration start times for the candidate sequences. We analyze the impact of the linear program and establish that it is a crucial component of the proposed method. We then provide insights about the cost of taking into consideration time-related aspects of the problem, i.e., integrated planning horizons, drug stability times, and administration time windows.