Austin Chapter of INFORMS General Meeting and Seminar

General Information

Speaker Information

Title: "The Vehicle Routing Problem and Its Use in Modeling the Service Chain of Mobile Work Forces"

PointServe is an Austin company that, since 1996, attempts to model the service chain for providers of mobile work forces. Once a model is available,
software is used to optimize the value of that model to allow our customers to reduce their costs while at the same time to provide an increased level of service
for their customers. Components of the service chain include appointment allocation and multi-day visit planning, batch scheduling, management of other
(non-customer) work activities, and real-time dispatch and event handling. Many of these components rely on a solution to the vehicle routing problem, and aspects
of this problem include the optimization of distance, time windows, availability, skills and preferences, and other restrictions. The conformation of our model
to any and every type of mobile workforce provider is one of the strengths of our technology, and we do this by casting all of the complexity of the model onto the
so-called scoring function. We have applied several heuristics and meta-heuristics to optimize the model, and these approaches include the greedy (minimum cost
insertions), OPT-2, and genetic algorithms. This talk will not talk in detail about what we consider to be successful approaches to arriving at the optimal
solutions, because this information is proprietary. Rather, the talk will emphasize the importance of the vehicle routing problem on modeling of the service
chain and how casting the complexity of the problem onto the scoring function is a powerful way to provide practical value-based solutions for a wide
variety of providers.

PointServe, Inc. offers local employment opportunities in the area of Operations Research as well as research topics for graduate students. Mark will share the
details following his presentation.