Flexible work planning of service agents with load balancing
针对29名流动服务代理为412个客户提供1090项服务的日常规划问题，开发了一个灵活工具，通过引入工作量平衡（与成本最小化可能冲突）和两种负载度量，实现了成本降低、服务改进和负载均衡，关键绩效指标改善20%以上。
This work emerged from the need to better plan the daily work of 29 travelling service agents, who provide 1090 services to 412 customers in 283 sites, on daily average. A handy and flexible tool was developed and is presented herein. A major contribution of this study is an explicit consideration of the multi-dimensional nature of the problem by the inclusion of workload balancing, which may stand in conflict to cost minimisation. Further, the geographical distribution of the demand is highly irregular. Therefore, two load measures are required and balanced. This required to fitting a proper planning scheme. The planning tool has been applied successfully by the commercial service provider. Improvements in the order of 20% and more were obtained in key performance measures. Moreover, cost reductions, service improvement and load balance were obtained simultaneously: the standard deviations of the service times and working day’s duration were reduced by 18 and 58%, respectively. This enables to reduce the number of agents with no significant harm in performance. Additional practical advantages of the proposed tool are also discussed and demonstrated, for example, the ability to cope with geographical distributions and the flexibility to respond to daily variations in demand.