Describe

IBM ILOG Dispatcher User's Manual > Field Service Solutions > Dispatching Technicians II > Describe

Describe

In Lesson 13, Dispatching Technicians, the concept of routing skilled technicians to customer sites was introduced. In that lesson, any technician could visit any customer site to perform any job, but the cost would vary depending on the level of the skill delivered and the level of the skill needed at the customer site.

This lesson examines the case where each customer visit requires a specific set of three skills (the job or visit profile) to complete the visit. However, not all technicians possess the appropriate skills. The problem therefore consists of routing the technicians to jobs that they can be accomplish. Furthermore, most technicians can perform various jobs at customer sites, but with different levels of effectiveness.

Step 1 -

Describe the problem

The first step is to write a natural language description of the problem. A good way to start this process is to analyze the constraints and objectives.

What are the constraints in this problem?

Customer visits require specific skills from a pool of technicians with differing ability levels.
There are ten different job profiles (VisitProfileID) required at the customer sites, and there are five different technicians skill profiles (TechProfileID) with which to perform the customer jobs.
The ability level of each technician at a particular skill (skillnLevel) varies from zero (not able to perform that skill) to five ("expert"). There is a constraint of a minimum ability level per skill. For example, a job may require level 3 at skill 1, level 4 at skill 2, and level 5 at skill 3.
There are time constraints on some visits and the depot, as well as a service time.

The objective is to minimize the cost of routing the technicians to all customer sites.

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