Abstract Home Healthcare is an essential component of healthcare systems, where caregivers visit patients’ homes to deliver services. While presenting advantages with respect to institutional care, such as being cost-effective and alleviating family burdens, it presents challenges in scheduling and routing caregivers efficiently. While various formulations of such a problem—the home healthcare routing and scheduling problem—have been proposed, many fail to include key real-world features, limiting their applicability in practice. This paper consolidates relevant features from existing models and significantly extends the formulation by Mankowska et al. (2014) to develop a unified framework incorporating as many real-world aspects as possible. We introduce a new instance generator, a set of real-world features to describe these instances, and a comprehensive infrastructure for validating and comparing solutions. Furthermore, we extend two state-of-the-art solution methods—simulated annealing and one based on a compact mixed integer linear programming model solved by a state-of-the-art software – to integrate all these features and provide a comparative analysis of their performance. Results show that our general solution methods are able to outperform methods specialized for a specific formulation on many instances.
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