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© a.p.solve Limited 2003
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Dynamic Scheduling in Mobile Workforce Management
Ralf KeuthenPLANET Information Day, Bilbao, 2003
© a.p.solve Limited 2003
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Contents
Automated Mobile Workforce Management The Workforce Scheduling Problem TASKFORCE System Overview Issues
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Mobile Workforce Management
a.p.solve -- A Short History Involved in mobile workforce management since
1987. Produced two major Work Management Systems
which have evolved into the TASKFORCE products we currently market.
a.p.solve (100+ employees) was spun out via the British Telecom’s Brightstar business incubator initiative in April 2003.
a.p.solve’s planning and scheduling products primarily support the management of mobile workers via Personal Digital Assistants and mobile telephony.
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Scope
Large telecommunication, cable, utility and fix & repair companies typically maintain a fieldforce of 100s - 10,000s of technicians
The fieldforce supplies provision of service, repair and maintenance tasks on a daily basis (between 1000s - 100,000s of tasks/day)
Customers Residential, Business (provision, repair) Company itself (maintenance, repair)
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Example: Mobile Workforce at British Telecom
BT Customer Access: a.p.solve’s TASKFORCE products currently schedule
BT’s workforce of Service Technicians. ~25,000 field technicians ~150,000 tasks every day across the United Kingdom. A high quality service at low operational cost needs to
be delivered.
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Work Management Organisation
Domains: Geographical
partition of the work area
into autonomous domains
Domains controlled by automated work management system
Supervised by a human controller
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Organisation: How it works
• Call Centre
• Network Service
TASKFORCE
• Handheld terminal
• Laptop
• Mobile
Customer Service
Work allocation and visualisation
Dispatch work to technicians
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Organisation: How it works Customer Service:
take customer calls arrange appointments
TASKFORCE: provide customer service with a selection of
appointment slots Allocate work to technicians dispatch work to technicians
Technicians receive work details travel to and carry out work report back when work is finished
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Workforce Management: From a Scheduling Point of View
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Scheduling Model
Resources: Technicians Vehicles and other equipment
Activities: provision, repair and maintenance work
Constraints: time windows, access restrictions precedence constraints co-op, assists, etc.
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Main Objectives
right man - right time - right place - right costs Maximise productivity
number of tasks scheduled most efficient resource for each task
Ensure a high quality of service compliance with agreed appointments & due dates work importance
- Minimise costs travel times waiting/idle times overtime
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Other Objectives
Workforce satisfaction task preferences preferred working areas
Business rules every technician gets a job avoid the splitting of tasks over breaks (if possible)
Avoid disturbances robust schedules flexible schedule
Some of these contradict one another
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Issues
Dynamics/Uncertainties/Complexities of problem
Scale
The need for a totally automated, online, system.
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Dynamics
Tasks
The company and its customers can
request cancel amend tasks (at all time!!)
Resources
Availability subject to last minute changes personal absence, sick leave, etc changes to task completion times vehicle breakdown
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Uncertainties Duration of tasks
Uncertain due to exact scale of work often unknown before a
technician arrives on site varying technician skill levels
Travel times
Uncertain due to weather traffic conditions
Business objectives
Resource manager can change business objectives
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Complexities
Complex mixture of tasks: different execution target times (appointment/commitments) different task priorities: low - high priority tasks Wide range in the duration of tasks: 8 mins - several days
Inter task dependencies can be complex coops, assists tasks pre-installation tasks stock point visits, etc
Site access restrictions security access business opening times road closure, etc
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Complexities
Geographical complexities diverse (London vs East Wales, etc) Preferred working areas
Skills heterogeneous workforce diverse skill set
Work type and work skill imbalances some geographical areas can be under resourced certain skills can be under resourced
Business Rules
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Scale
Scale of individual problems domain dependent
Technicians: 10s to 100s of technicians
Tasks: 100s to 1000s of tasks
Scheduler needs to cope efficiently with all domains
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Issues
No realistic forecasting possible! Assumed ‘static’ environment?
Optimised schedules quickly become sub optimal or even infeasible
What is optimality in an dynamic environment? First thing in the morning everything changes !!
(sick leave, new tasks, etc) Building robust/flexible schedules?
Limited applicability Radical changes to the current schedule are
possible and may even be desired
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Scheduling Opportunities:
Impact of Personal Digital Assistants on Scheduling
Practice: Mobile phones, laptops, handheld terminals, the Internet, etc
allows to dispatch tasks to mobile workers in real time tasks are (usually) dispatched one by one Technician can drive to first task of the day straight from home
and drive back home after last job is finished. No need to visit a control site.
Scheduling impact: allows to adjust the schedule to the changed environment allows to correct (some) scheduling decisions made earlier
However, the time available to react to changes is very limited
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TASKFORCE System Overview
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Needed Automation
Automated data flow from order source systems to job dispatch.
Schedule revision must be automatic and robust. On line Dispatcher must be able to cope with corrupted
schedules. The real-line monitoring of the location of mobile
technicians and their expected completion times is important.
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TASKFORCE
Developed by BT and employed since 1997.
TASKFORCE supports: Resource Management Operations Management Schedule/Jeopardy Management Progress Management Scheduling & Dispatching
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System Overview
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Schedule Manager
Planer that transforms customer orders (service requests) into scheduling variables with their associated constraints
Identifies tasks in jeopardy of becoming tardy Pre-processes tasks & resource information according
to business rules Calls scheduling tools to create/maintain executable
schedule
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Scheduling Needs
Batch Scheduling Schedule revision Appointment booking support Interrupt Scheduling Route Optimisation Schedule Dispatcher What-If Scheduling Schedule Visualisation & Manual scheduling support
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Architecture Overview
Visualiser
DS
Pre-scheduler
Optimiser
Interrupt Scheduler
Dispatcher
Intelligent Appointer
Schedule Manager
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Batch Scheduler
Runs before start of working day to construct high quality schedule Build provisional start-of-day schedule Schedule construction & route optimisation
Techniques: Chronological backtracking based Constructive
Algorithm assign important and hard to schedule tasks
Local Search based optimisation supported by a constraint net to ensure feasibility
Stochastic Local Search: Simulated Annealing
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Dynamic Scheduler
Run while schedule is being executed to maintain a high quality schedule
Responsibilities: Absorb schedule changes and most up to date
information Rebuild, repair, update & re-optimise provisional
schedule How it works:
Perform frequent short batch runs to rebuild a feasible schedule
Pass provisional schedule to Schedule Manager
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Dynamic Scheduler
Pre-scheduling: Reload and try to rebuild old schedule
Tree Search assigning remaining important and hard to schedule tasks
Optimisation: Low Temperature Simulated Annealing.
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Intelligent Appointer
Controller/call centre support tool Heuristic based
find a set of feasible appointment slots based on the current schedule
suggest feasible appointment slots to human controller
controller books appointment slot and associates time windows with the new task
task is sent to schedule manager
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Interrupt Scheduler
Automatic Schedule Revision: Reallocation algorithm to support situations where
important work would otherwise fail. The system can’t find an available resource for high
priority work at specified times Interrupt scheduler identifies a sequence of
reallocations to free a technician to perform the work
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Automatic Dispatcher Online and event triggered System Responds to requests for work from field force in real-
time, making alterations to the planned tour as required.
Supports the management of uncertainties & last second changes to the schedule associated with: travel time & task duration arrival of new high priority work and cancellation of
already scheduled work
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Dispatching Algorithms
Rule based system. If Field Technician request work then the Dispatcher
identifies a task for the technician to service. Rule Examples:
Find work on site for technicians rather than travel to new locations
Give preference to tasks getting close to their deadlines
Keep technicians from travelling outside their preferred working area
etc, etcThis may result in the need to repair a damaged schedule
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What-if and Manual Scheduling
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 and data 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.
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Schedule Visualisation Tools
Compress schedule information and represent it
in a way that can easily be captured by the user Provides the human controller with:
statistics tour task tables Gantt chart map tour representation
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Schedule Visualisation: Gantt Chart
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Schedule Visualisation: Map
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Case Study: British Telecom
Work Stats: ~ 20,000 engineers ~ 150,000 tasks each day across the UK
Improvements through TASKFORCE Productivity was improved by 15 per cent Reduction in control sites from 100 (manual) to 15
(TASKFORCE) Greatly increased control-to-field employee ratio TASKFORCE enabled the introduction of several new, highly
competitive customer service initiatives: five-hour response time to business customers nine-hour commitment for residential customers.
Overall saving of £100 million per annum in service costs
Intelligent End-to-End Fieldforce Automation
www.apsolve.com