On the dynamic technician routing and scheduling problem

The Technician Routing and Scheduling Problem (TRSP) deals with a limited crew of technicians that serves a set of requests. In the TRSP, each technician has a set of skills, tools, and spare parts, while requests require a subset of each. The problem is then to design a set of tours of minimal total duration such that each request is visited exactly once, within its time window, by a technician with the required skills, tools, and spare parts. The TRSP naturally arises in a wide range of applications, including telecoms, public utilities, and maintenance operations. To the best of our knowledge, no work considers neither tools, nor spare parts, nor the arrival of new requests, three important components of real-world applications. The present work addresses this aspect and proposes an optimization approach for the dynamic version of the problem, noted D-TRSP, where new requests arrive during the execution of the routes.