BT Technol J Vol 16 No 3 July 1998 16 Engineering Dynamic Scheduler for Work Manager D Lesaint, N Azarmi, R Laithwaite and P Walker Provision of service to business and residential customers, network maintenance and fault repair are core activities of large telecommunications companies which involve thousands of technicians every day. Managing a large-sized workforce efficiently in a highly dynamic environment is a challenge that BT has addressed by automating its work management processes within a single application known as Work Manager. For the most part, the success of Work Manager rests upon the ability of its work allocation component in determining the best assignments at any time and in any environment. This paper presents a scheduler for Work Manager which is both predictive and reactive and whose computational model reconciles genericity and efficiency. Coupling Constraint Satisfaction and Local Search, this scheduler can generate long- term schedules that satisfy the conflicting objectives of feasibility, productivity, quality of service and cost minimisation. It also provides the capability to adjust schedules before despatch through on-line heuristic repair/improvement. Equipped with a powerful interface, this system has been successfully trialled within the field and is now deployed nationally. 1. Introduction For this reason, BT has automated its workforce management operations within a single application known as Work Manager. Among other operations, Work Manager automates the work allocation (deciding which task a technician should perform and when), the work despatch (informing a technician of his next assignment), and the work monitoring (feeding back information on the progress of tasks to the system). This paper is concerned with the design of the work allocation capability. The previous capability was a real-time algorithm (RTA) that computed the next assignment for each technician in a reactive way [1]. Originally, RTA had been designed to schedule tasks with short response time commitments and identical skill requirements. However, business needs have changed and it has become necessary to handle a greater variety of tasks (provision and repair), skills and geography (customer premises, exchanges and local network) and larger volumes of work (both reactive and proactive) so as to make Work Manager fully operational in different parts of BT’s business — residential customers, business customers, core network, etc (see Fig 1). The reactive scheduling strategy and the short-term view implemented with RTA have now become inadequate to address all aspects of the workforce scheduling problem. The lack of forward view prevents the full-scale optimisation of global objectives such as the prioritisation of tasks within individual schedules, the long-term minimisation of ineffective time or the appropriate distribution of the workload across technicians and over time. Besides, scheduling one task ahead for each technician does not enable a proper synchronisation of inter-dependent tasks (e.g. sequential tasks). Finally, the absence of prediction in the schedules may be the source of excessive manual scheduling which contradicts the primary ambition of a fully automated work allocation process. To make up for these limitations, a new solution has been developed — called Dynamic Scheduler — which is meant to be predictive as well as reactive. Dynamic Scheduler provides Work Manager with the capability to: • construct, for a mobile and multi-skilled workforce, long-term work schedules that account for all the allocation constraints, quality objectives and business rules operated in Work Manager domains, M ajor telecommunications companies employ a field workforce to serve customers, to maintain networks and to repair faults. This raises the issue of workforce management which can be summarised by the marching order ‘get the right technician, in the right place, at the right time, with the right stores, anytime, anywhere’. Workforce management is a major process for BT — 25 000 technicians perform 150 000 tasks every day across the UK — and the ability to deliver a high quality of service and of productivity, together with low operational costs, is vital to the success and competitiveness of the company as a whole.