Track: Modeling and Simulation

Abstract

Information technology has been widely used in many industries in recent days, and many companies use outsourcing services through managed service schemes with revenue sharing patterns. To maintain the services, the managed  service providers  need to have a well-planned maintenance activities for both preventive  and corrective purposes. Several operational parameters of maintenance are the number and location of the technician depot. These parameters must be determined optimally to meet the targeted service level. Meanwhile, there are some constraints that make the service providers require to design the optimum maintenance travel route for the maintenance technicians. This research use a case study of a service provider and adopts a vehicle routing problem (VRP) concept to develop an optimum route to support the maintenance activities for information technology infrastructure. To define the location of the depots and the maintenance routes, an algorithm of integrated location and technician routing problem with profits and time windows is developed. The numerical experiments show that the algorithm provides a better solution compared to the existing practice in the case study. This work provides not only a better solution and simple practice for the service provider companies but also enrich the literature in the development of VRP concept