On the impact of real-time information on field service scheduling

Mobile phone operators need to plan and schedule field force personnel for maintenance and repair tasks on mobile phone base stations across the country on a daily basis. In this paper, we will introduce the field force scheduling problem with priorities. Motivated by the rising popularity of mobile field force management solutions, we compare online and offline heuristics as well as hybrids to solve the problem. The results help understand the benefits of dynamic scheduling based on realtime position information as compared to traditional daily offline planning.