Evaluation of trip and car sharing concepts for home health care services

Routing and scheduling of home health care services usually focuses on the case where each nurse operates a separate vehicle. With increasing urbanisation, limited availability of parking spaces and stricter environmental regulations, service providers are starting to investigate car and trip sharing concepts as potential alternatives. This paper numerically investigates a car sharing concept as well as operating a transport system, which delivers and picks up nurses to and from clients combined with the additional option of walking. Different geographic distributions are investigated to identify beneficial settings for successful implementation considering various objectives of decision makers. The evaluation shows that trip sharing performs best if long service durations exist, long delays for parking occur and in areas where clients are both geographically distributed randomly and in clusters. Additionally, facilitating walking as well as trip or car sharing reduces the number of required vehicles substantially. Nevertheless, for walking and trip sharing, travel durations are prone to increase compared to classical planning approaches.