First PageFirst Page APSolve Sirius House Adastral Park Martlesham Ipswich IP5 3RE Tel: +44(0) Doc Ref: APS(uk)xxxx Issues in the On Line Scheduling of Mobile Workforces Jon Spragg © British Telecommunications plc 2001 Automation for Mobile Workforces

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 APSolve - A Short History Involved in Workforce Management since which was before my time. Produced 2 major Work Management Systems which have evolved into the taskforce products we currently market. APSolve (100+ employees) is being ‘spun out’ via BT’s business incubator early next year. APSolve aimed primarily at supporting the Telecom and IT Services markets.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Workforce Management at BT APSOLVE’s TASKFORCE currently manages BT’s workforce of Service Technicians. 25,000 field technicians perform 150,000 tasks every day across the United Kingdom. A high quality service at low operational costs needs to be delivered.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Issues Complexity of problem Scale The need for a totally automated system. Making it work, and keeping it working

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Complexity Ever changing workload with a 1 hour response time. Complex mixture of target time types/priorities Wide range in work durations: 8 mins - several days. Work duration is uncertain. Work type and Work skill imbalances. Task inter-dependencies can be complex. Travel time calculations are subject to change -- and how!

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Scale 20,000+ technicians, mostly mobile Several hundred thousand tasks to be scheduled and dispatched every day. Distinct workforces and scheduling environments. Optimised work allocation and sequencing is essential

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Automation Automated data flow from order source systems to product dispatch. Schedule revision must be automatic and robust. On line Dispatcher must handle corrupted schedules. The real-time monitoring of the location of mobile technicians and their expected completion times is important.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Making it work Really understanding the scheduling environment, its complexity and desired solution quality. Getting the correct level of system performance. Data quality and automatic exception handling. User training

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 System Overview

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Scheduling Needs Batch scheduling Schedule revision Interrupt scheduling Resource modelling Route optimisation What-if scheduling Schedule execution rules complex, often requiring schedule repair and re optimisation

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 The Taskforce Planning/Scheduling Framework Schedule Manager Resource Manager Operations Manager Optimising Allocator

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Schedule Manager Delivers work schedules for each technician. It consists of: Batch Scheduler Dynamic Scheduler What-if Scheduler Manual Scheduler

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Scheduler Interaction Common Schedule Representation, Constraint Model & Algorithm library Batch Scheduler Dynamic Scheduler Interrupt Scheduler What-If Scheduler Schedule Manager

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Batch Scheduler Run primarily overnight to produce highly optimised schedules for following day: Employs both constructive and local neighbourhood search algorithms. Business rules and operational constraints are modelled by a multi-criteria objective function and arc-b consistency procedures.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Dynamic Scheduler Is used for schedule revision and ensuring that the most up to date information is absorbed into the schedule. It is based on an iterative schedule repair procedure.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Interrupt Scheduler Supports situations where work would otherwise fail: For example: In situations where operational priorities change, current work needs to be postponed to free resources for other, higher priority, work.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 What-if and Manual Schedulers Are off-line schedulers that support work controllers by providing the visual and analysis tools to try out different scheduling parameters and allocations to discover improvement opportunities without risk. Changes to scheduling parameters can be applied to current or archived data and the resulting schedule can be examined in an off-line environment. Changes can then be applied to live sites.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Schedule Manager This is the Planner that transforms customer orders (requests for service) into scheduling variables with their associated constraints. The Schedule Manager is the system that identifies tasks in jeopardy of becoming tardy.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Optimising Allocator Responds to requests for work from field force in real-time, making alterations to the planned tour as required. It thereby supports the management of uncertainties associated with travel time calculations, task durations, etc. It supports the arrival of new high priority work or the cancellation of already scheduled work.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Overview of Scheduling Algorithms All are examples of search supported by constraint propagation. Constructive search Chronological backtracking (Dynamic Scheduler, Batch Scheduler) Beam search (Interrupt Scheduler) Local neighbourhood search Simulated annealing (Batch Scheduler, Dynamic Scheduler)

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Planning and Dispatch Algorithms Heuristic and Rule Based. Examples of planning rules are: Finding work on site for technicians rather than have them travel to new locations. Spreading the workload evenly across the workforce. Keeping technicians from travelling outside of their preferred working area. Identifying tasks that require two or more technicians on site. Etc. etc.

© British Telecommunications plc 2001 Planned Future Improvements Optimally configuring these algorithms for handling changing and diverse scheduling environments and problems. I.e. getting our simulated annealing algorithm to ‘learn’ to recognise unpromising runs and thereby avoid wasting time in local optima.

Last PageLast Page Your Schedules – Our Solutions APSolve Sirius House Adastral Park Martlesham Ipswich IP5 3RE Tel: +44(0) © British Telecommunications plc 2001 Automation for Mobile Workforces