Intervention Planning in ITIL Context: Constraint-Based Modeling and Symmetry-Based Filtering Techniques

In incident management and especially in after-sales services, customer interventions must be planned according to a priority order set by service level agreements as well as the availability of both technicians and clients. Despite the availability of incident management software solutions, intervention planning is still performed manually in most solutions because numerous constraints must be considered such as the synchronization of technician skills and customer requests, their availability, and the customer priorities. The intervention planning problem is considered as a difficult combinatorial optimization issue. Various approaches have been proposed in the literature including the transformation of this problem into a vehicle routing problem (VRP) or into a CSP in the context of ITIL framework. Yet, the resolution of this problem with a classical CSP solver is time consuming and must be optimized by proposing filtering rules or specific heuristics. This paper proposes the improved CSP and COP models for intervention planning problem with implementing filtering rules and techniques.