Improving the Research Strategy in the Problem of Intervention Planning by the Use of Symmetries

Abstract

The problem of interventions planning allows assigning technicians to geographically dispersed clients to serve them for the resolution of one or more incidents. This problem can be a relatively complex task, and is usually done manually in most existing IT management software since it must be ensured that each intervention is assigned to the most competent technician and many constraints must be respected such as availability and skill for each technician and customer priorities.

There is the problem of planning interventions in the maintenance management processes or after-sales services, especially when there is a need to respect quality standards, for example ITIL standard which is a repository of good practice and which improves the quality of information systems and the quality of assistance.

Several works have been developed in this context, for example by trying to turn the problem of intervention planning into a vehicle routing problem (VRP), or to transform it into a CSP. Also, filtering rules have been proposed in the literature to optimize the resolution time. However, even with these proposed rules, the resolution time remains very important.

In this paper, we propose to improve the CSP and COP models for the problem of intervention planning and we propose other filtering rules with the use of techniques based on the elimination of symmetries to detect equivalent solutions to optimize the resolution time.