Technician Assignment With Mathematical Optimization

Problem

You are consulting for a telecom company that dispatches technicians to perform various tasks for customers, ranging from equipment installations and setups to repairs. Considering various constraints such as:

• Technician availability
• Skillset matching
• Customer time window
• Service priority
• Start and return of technicians to the central depot
• Limited resources/vans

The goal is to decide:

• Which technicians are assigned to which customers and in what sequence?
• How to allocate the limited resources, ensuring each technician has access to a van?

We use a two-step solution approach, using Mathematical Optimization (MO) in both, to solve this problem.

Repo Guide

• The first model is called Technician Routing where we decide which technicians are assigned to which customers and in what sequence. This model is described and solved in the technician_routing notebook.
• The second model is called Resource Assignment where we decide which technicians should be assigned to which vans. This model is described and solved in the resource_assignment notebook.
  • There are two versions of this notebook: a partial version (resource_assignment) that can be used for teaching, and one with the complete description, formulation, and the code (resource_assignment_complete).
• The data-Sce0.xlsx is the input used for the Technician Routing model.
• The routes.csv and orders.csv are the outputs of Technician Routing model and are used as inputs for the Resource Assignment model. Of course, you can run the technician_routing notebook and or even modify it as you please to get new results. Ensure the format of the output is similar in case you like to use the resource_assignment notebook afterward.

The model size is intentionally small to ensure even those without access to a Gurobi license can run the model (check out License Requirement section for more info about the license).

Google Colab

If you like to access the notebooks in Google Colab, click:

• technician_routing
• resource_assignment

Note that you must sign in with a Google account to be able to run the code in Colab.

License Requirement

The problem is modeled using Gurobi Python API. So, a Gurobi license is required to run this model. If you don’t have a license, you can request a free commercial evaluation license or a free academic license here. The data used in the models is small enough to run the model with a Gurobi restricted license (available via pip install gurobi as shown in the notebook).