Design of job assignment and routing policies in service logistics

Abstract

In this study, we consider to improve efficiency of an after-sales technical service in home appliances industry. The efficiency measure is the total time spent in a day to serve customer requests. Hence, the objective is to minimize total working hours spent in a day in the aftersales services. We first analyze the system to identify causes of delays in job completion. Upon findings of our analysis we choose to focus on job assignment and job sequencing to improve efficiency. We propose a mixed integer programming model for the assignment of technicians to jobs and sequencing of jobs for each technician to minimize total time spent in a day. Through this model we solve the problem with expected job durations. We present a numerical study to illustrate the proposed solution procedure.