Technicians selection and allocation in field services using a hybrid approach

Field service management (FSM) is to manage and mobilise technicians to customer locations for maintenance of assets. Increasing competition and decreasing margins force manufacturers of industrial equipment to augment with effective field service planning. Technician selection and allocation are essential cornerstones of field service planning. Efficient delivery of field services is a challenging task. Decisions are typically made under a dynamic and uncertain environment with assets installed at geographically dispersed locations. Researchers have explored the heuristics, algorithms and knowledge-based analysis for decision making in technician selection and allocation. Attention is sought to find methods for addressing the selection and allocation of technicians comprehensively. This paper presents a hybrid approach combining the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) integrated with mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to rank and allocate technicians to spatially distributed field services. The objective is to minimise the field service fulfilment cost. An example of a power generating company is presented.