EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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1574. Allocation and routing of service technicians with different skill levels

Invited abstract in session MD-25: Discrete, continuous or stochastic optimization and control in networks, transportation and design IV, stream Combinatorial Optimization.

Monday, 14:30-16:00
Room: 011 (building: 208)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Xingyi Wang
TUM School of Management, TU München
2. Gudrun Kiesmuller
TUM School of Management, TU München
3. Rainer Kolisch
TUM School of Management, Technical University of Munich

Abstract

Typically, companies for home appliances offer after-sales services, especially repair services, to their customers. One of the challenging planning problems that has to be solved in this context is the allocation and routing of service technicians that satisfy customers' service requests. In this paper, we consider heterogeneous technicians with two different skill levels. Junior technicians have less experience and, therefore, may fail to repair the appliance successfully, and senior technicians will repair the appliance successfully. In case of a failed service repair by a junior technician, a second visit by a senior technician is necessary. We formulate the problem as a sequential decision problem, where new customer requests arrive in each period, and decisions on the allocation and routing of service technicians are made at the beginning of each period. While the customer requests are known for the current period, future requests and their locations are unknown. The objective is the minimization of the total expected technicians' travel and customers' waiting costs. Several heuristic methods are proposed to solve the multi-period problem. We perform an extensive numerical study comparing the performance of the heuristic methods in different problem settings and provide managerial insights.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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