The project proposal of Dr. Çağrı Koç, Assistant Professor in our department, titled as “Home Healthcare Electric Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problems” has been awarded with the support of the TUBITAK ARDEB 3501 National Young Researchers Career Development Program. The project will last 30 months with the cooperation of TOBB University of Economics and Technology and Atılım University.

The aging and growing population in the world, especially in developed countries, increases the demand for home health care which has lower cost and high efficiency than treatment at hospitals. Home healthcare providers assign staff who provide service to patients and plan their working time. Routes of the staff and time to visit each demand node should be determined. The most important distinguishing feature and the original contribution of this project is the use of electric vehicles home health services and development of solution methods considering the different realistic constraints and parameters of the decision makers in this field. With these solution methods, not only in the home healthcare sector, but also due to the flexible structure of the problem, it will be contributed to the electric routing area. By providing effective solution methods to this operational problem of the fast growing on-site service sector, service level and customer satisfaction will be increased and operational costs will be reduced. This project aims to provide managerial and policy insights to the decision makers about the problem, based on problem size, solution quality and solution time, and the suitability of heuristic methods to obtain solutions. Therefore, the outputs of this project are thought to have important scientific, technological and socio-economic contributions.