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Liu_Service Scheduling to Minimise Risk - SAIConference PAPER.pdf (478.86 kB)

Service scheduling to minimise the risk of missing appointments

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conference contribution
posted on 2018-06-25, 12:51 authored by Chenlu Ji, Anne Liret, Gilbert Owusu, Jiyin LiuJiyin Liu, Raphael Dorne, Rupal MandaniaRupal Mandania
© 2017 IEEE. This paper introduces the risk minimisation objective in the Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem (SVRP). In the studied variant of SVRP, technicians drive to customer sites to provide service. The service times and travel times are stochastic, and a time window is required for the start of the service for each customer. Most previous research uses a chance-constrained approach to the problem. Some consider the probability of journey duration exceeding the threshold of the driver's workload while others set restrictions on the probability of individual time window constraints being violated. Their objectives are related to traditional routing costs whilst a different approach was taken in this paper. The risk of missing a task is defined as the probability that the technician assigned to the task arrives at the customer site later than the time window. The problem studied in this paper is to generate a schedule that minimises the maximum risk and sum of risks of the tasks. The duration of each task may be considered as following a known normal distribution. However the distribution of the start time of the service at a customer site will not be normally distributed due to time window constraints. Therefore a multiple integral expression of the risk was derived, and this expression works whether task distribution is normal or not. Additionally a deterministic heuristic searching method was applied to solve the problem. Experiments are carried out to test the method. Results of this work have been applied to an industrial case of SVRP where field engineering individuals drive to customer sites to provide time-constrained services. This original approach allows organisations to pay more attention to increasing customer satisfaction and become more competitive in the market.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Proceedings of Computing Conference 2017

Volume

2018-January

Pages

971 - 980

Citation

JI, C. ...et al., 2018. Service scheduling to minimise the risk of missing appointments. Proceedings of Computing Conference 2017, London, 18-20th. July, pp. 971-980.

Publisher

© IEEE

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2018

Notes

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

ISBN

9781509054435

Language

  • en