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

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.