Effective heuristic procedures for a field technician scheduling problem

This paper addresses a field technician scheduling problem faced by many service providers in telecommunication industry. The problem is to assign a set of jobs, at different locations with time windows, to a group of field technicians with different job skills. Such a problem can be viewed as a generalization of the well-known vehicle routing problem with time windows since technician skills need to be matched with job types. We designed and tested several heuristic procedures for solving the problem, namely a greedy heuristic, a local search algorithm, and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP). Our computational results indicate that GRASP is the most effective among them but requires more CPU time. However, the unique structure of GRASP allows us to exploit parallelism to achieve linear speed-up with respect to the number of machines used.