ENGINEERING DYNAMIC SCHEDULER FOR WORK MANAGER

Provision of service to business and residential customers, network ma intenance and fault repair are core activities of large telecommunicat ions companies which involve thousands of technicians every day. Manag ing a large-sized workforce efficiently in a highly dynamic environmen t is a challenge that BT has addressed by automating its work manageme nt processes within a single application known as Work Manager. For th e 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 Satisf action and Local Search, this scheduler can generate longterm schedule s that satisfy the conflicting objectives of feasibility, productivity , quality of service and cost minimisation. It also provides the capab ility to adjust schedules before despatch through on-line heuristic re pair/improvement. Equipped (sic).