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 has to 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 assess the performance of the proposed method by comparing its solutions with those obtained through a compact mathematical formulation. We then provide insights about the cost of taking into consideration time-related aspects of the problem, , integrated planning horizons, drug stability times, and administration time windows.

中文翻译：

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家庭化疗递送：集成生产调度和多行程车辆路径问题

家庭化疗系统允许在患者的住所进行癌症治疗，从而避免住院治疗。这种创新的医疗保健模式在经济和人类层面上都很有趣。它还带来了一些后勤挑战。本文重点讨论家庭化疗服务中出现的优化问题之一，其中复杂的调度问题是运营规划过程的基础。事实上，一些注射化疗药物可能仅在生产后几个小时内保持稳定。因此，它们的生产必须与给药一起仔细安排，给药在预定的时间窗口内在患者家中进行。这产生了集成的生产调度和车辆路径问题，我们使用大型邻域搜索方法来解决该问题。生产和施用序列被迭代修改，同时线性程序用于确定候选序列的最佳生产和施用开始时间。我们分析了线性程序的影响，并确定它是所提出方法的关键组成部分。我们通过将其解决方案与通过紧凑的数学公式获得的解决方案进行比较来评估所提出方法的性能。然后，我们提供有关考虑问题的时间相关方面的成本、综合规划范围、药物稳定性时间和给药时间窗口的见解。