A GRASP-based approach for technicians and interventions scheduling for telecommunications

The Technicians and Interventions Scheduling Problem for Telecommunications embeds the scheduling of interventions, the assignment of teams to interventions and the assignment of technicians to teams. Every intervention is characterized, among other attributes, by a priority. The objective of this problem is to schedule interventions such that the interventions with the highest priority are scheduled at the earliest time possible while satisfying a set of constraints like the precedence between some interventions and the minimum number of technicians needed with the required skill levels for the intervention. We present a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) for solving this problem. In the proposed implementation, we integrate learning to the GRASP framework in order to generate good-quality solutions using information brought by previous ones. We also compute lower bounds and present experimental results that validate the effectiveness of this approach.

[1]  Mauricio G. C. Resende,et al.  Grasp: An Annotated Bibliography , 2002 .

[2]  J B Atkinson,et al.  A greedy randomised search heuristic for time-constrained vehicle scheduling and the incorporation of a learning strategy , 1998, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[3]  F. Glover,et al.  Handbook of Metaheuristics , 2019, International Series in Operations Research & Management Science.

[4]  M. Resende,et al.  A probabilistic heuristic for a computationally difficult set covering problem , 1989 .

[5]  M. Resende,et al.  A GRASP for graph planarization , 1997 .

[6]  Thomas H. Cormen,et al.  Introduction to algorithms [2nd ed.] , 2001 .

[7]  Hans Kellerer,et al.  Knapsack problems , 2004 .

[8]  Luca Maria Gambardella,et al.  Adaptive memory programming: A unified view of metaheuristics , 1998, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[9]  Fred Glover,et al.  Improved Constructive Multistart Strategies for the Quadratic Assignment Problem Using Adaptive Memory , 1999, INFORMS J. Comput..

[10]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures , 2003, Handbook of Metaheuristics.

[11]  Daniele Vigo,et al.  Models and Bounds for Two-Dimensional Level Packing Problems , 2004, J. Comb. Optim..

[12]  Mauricio G. C. Resende,et al.  Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures , 1995, J. Glob. Optim..

[13]  Steve Y. Chiu,et al.  Effective Heuristic Procedures for a Field Technician Scheduling Problem , 2001, J. Heuristics.

[14]  R. K. Shyamasundar,et al.  Introduction to algorithms , 1996 .

[15]  C. Ribeiro,et al.  Essays and Surveys in Metaheuristics , 2002, Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series.