A Decision Support System for Attended Home Services

This Talk presents a decision support system (DSS) developed to solve a practical attended home services problem faced by Iren Group, an Italian multiutility company operating in the distribution of electricity, gas, and water. The company operates in several regions across Italy and aims to optimize the organizational system appointed to dispatch technicians to customer locations, where they perform installations, closures, or maintenance activities within time slots chosen by the customers. Indeed, attended home services (AHS) are service delivery systems in which a supplying company and a customer agree on a time window during which the customer will be home and the service will be performed. Typically, the optimization of AHS requires solving a two-stage problem, combining appointment scheduling and vehicle routing. The DSS uses historical data and helps operations managers in performing a number of strategic decisions: grouping municipalities into clusters; designing sets of model-weeks (i.e., matrices of resources distributed among five working days and eight daily time slots of one hour, that define the capacity allocated to a given cluster); evaluating the obtained solutions by means of a dynamic rolling horizon simulator; and providing as output several key performance indicators, as well as visual optimized technician routing plans used to analyze different scenarios. The system integrates simple machine learning techniques, mathematical models, heuristic algorithms and simulation methods that have been specifically developed to take into account different quality of service levels, in accordance with the directives imposed by the authority that regulates the Italian market. Computational experiments carried out on data provided by the company confirm the efficiency of the proposed methods, both in terms of effort reduction and routing costs saving (10% on average) [4]. Additionally, the DSS constitutes a powerful tool that can support the company in the strategical evaluation of existing and potential market opportunities.