Approximate Dynamic Programming for Real-time Dispatching and Relocation of Emergency Service Engineers

TL;DR

This paper introduces an approximate dynamic programming approach for real-time dispatching and relocation of emergency service engineers, significantly improving response times in spare parts networks.

Contribution

It develops a novel ADP-based method for engineer dispatching and relocation, with two new algorithms for policy tuning, outperforming benchmark policies in simulations.

Findings

ADP policy reduces late arrivals significantly.

High-quality solutions outperform benchmarks.

No increase in average response time.

Abstract

Quick response times are paramount for minimizing downtime in spare parts networks for capital goods, such as medical and manufacturing equipment. To guarantee that the maintenance is performed in a timely fashion, strategic management of both spare parts and service engineers is essential. While there is a rich body of research literature devoted to spare parts management, the problem of real-time management of service engineers has drawn relatively little attention. Motivated by this, we consider how to dispatch service engineers to breakdowns, and how to relocate idle engineers between base stations. We develop an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) approach to produce dispatching and relocation policies, and propose two new algorithms to tune the ADP policy. We conduct extensive computational experiments to compare the ADP policy against two benchmark policies by means of simulation. These demonstrate that the ADP approach can generate high-quality solutions that outperform both benchmarks across a wide range of networks and parameters. We observe significant improvements in terms of fraction of late arrivals over the two benchmarks, without increase in average response time.