Authors
D Lesaint, C Voudouris, N Azarmi, I Alletson, B Laithwaite
Publication date
2003/10
Journal
BT Technology Journal
Volume
21
Issue
4
Pages
23-26
Publisher
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Description
BT employs thousands of field engineers across the UK to maintain networks, repair faults and provide service to customers. To allocate work more efficiently, BT launched Work Manager in the early 1990s — an information system automating work management and field communications, and now marketed as a.p.solve's TASKFORCE. In 1996, BT Exact's Intelligent Systems Lab enhanced Work Manager with a Dynamic Scheduler (DS) combining heuristic search and constraint-based reasoning. Since its national roll-out in 1997, DS has consistently reduced operational costs while preserving high quality of service. This paper gives an overview of BT's workforce scheduling problem, the DS system, and its operational and commercial impact.
Total citations
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Scholar articles
D Lesaint, C Voudouris, N Azarmi, I Alletson… - BT Technology Journal, 2003