Genetic algorithm and tabu search methods for care service scheduling problem and comparison between these two methods

A Home Care Service Scheduling Problem (HCSSP) is a real world (large-scale) and multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem. To plan the schedule, we need to satisfy requests of all dependents and constraints at the number of helpers who each provider can dispatch to them. It takes a lot of time to get the optimal schedule of HCSSP. From the practical point of view, we should not wait for hours to get the optimal schedule but use quasi-optimal schedules. In order to obtain a quasi-optimal schedule quickly, we solve HCSSP by meta-heuristic methods. In this paper we show and compare two methods to solve HCSSP. One is Genetic Algorithm (GA) method, another is Tabu Search (TS) method. Comparison in our case shows that TS is superior to GA.