A bi-level optimization model of the technician routing and scheduling problem for access communications

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Access Communications is a cable television and telecommunications provider serving over 240 communitiesin Saskatchewan. These communities are widely spread across the province, spanning a large geographic area.One of the main functions for technical operations at Access Communications is to respond to customerrequests, service issues and to provide preventive maintenance measures. Currently, Access Communicationsemploys more than 50 full-time technicians in addition to a pool of 3rd-party contractors with a variety ofdifferent skill sets. Access Communications is interested in investigating the process of assigning technicians tojobs/communities and where to locate technicians based on current demand zones and technician skill sets.They are also interested in finding an optimal routing schedule that will minimize travel time for technicians.The ultimate goal is to reduce drive time, reduce the number of contractors needed, and to enhance customerservice.The problem of technician scheduling and routing is a hard optimization problem. Although there are a numberof research papers that discuss this problem, the setting and limitations faced by Access Communications areunique. For that reason, we plan to develop a bi-level optimization model to best represent the companyproblem and limitations. Solving this kind of optimization problem is harder when the size of the problem islarge, so we plan to develop a heuristic algorithm that can generate reasonable solutions within a realistic timeframe.