Online Workforce Scheduling and Routing : A case study at an on-site service provider

Sammanfattning: The consumer market of today is characterized by emphasis on superior customer satisfaction and personalization of services. This entails higher customer expectations on organizations, which also includes the workforce scheduling processes in which the consumers expect more decision-power to dictate what they want, when and where they want services to be delivered. For organizations that deliver on-site services, the routing aspect becomes an important part of the scheduling process. Literature on Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems (WSRP) seldom relate to characteristics of the more dynamic consumer market. As the markets and consumer needs become more flexible, the relevance for research concerning these characteristics increases. This study addresses this by reviewing current literature and present common solution methodologies applied to WSRP, as well as the effects of the online scheduling characteristics. With this as a foundation, a discussion is provided of how WSRP and online scheduling can be combined in order to improve resource utilization and minimize travel time for an on-site service provider. The overall aim of the study is to investigate how an online WSRP with exact time windows can be formulated and solved. The result is a four-stage hybrid method including linear integer programming and constructive heuristics with the objective to minimize travel time, idle time, and the makespan in the schedules. A case study has been conducted on an on-site service provider, and by applying the proposed hybrid methodology on the case company’s scheduling process, results have been obtained that demonstrates improvements of travel time and resource utilization. The study also demonstrate that the appliance of flexible travel times and product dependent service times have positive impact on the quality of the generated schedules. A key insight is that organizations working with exact time windows have to be aware of the trade-off between customer preferences and operational efficiency in day-to-day operations. Thus, organizations have to decide what holds most importance to the organization’s long-term success.