Assigning and Scheduling Service Visits in a Mixed Urban/Rural Setting

In this paper we describe a complex optimization application arising in maintenance scheduling, developed in close collaboration with an industrial partner. We have to plan and schedule preventive and corrective maintenance activities at customer sites by a group of traveling repair technicians. A specific property of the problem considered here is a mix of customers in both urban centers and rural areas. This means that travel times between customers must be considered when balancing overall workload for each agent. We discuss a problem decomposition compatible with current management practice, describe different solvers for the individual problem steps, and show results on real-world data from the industrial partner.