Application of Particle Swarm Optimization to the British Telecom Workforce Scheduling Problem

When technicians are deployed in field service, they must be allocated to the correct assignment and their routes should also be optimised as a part of that process. Data from a practical case of British Telecom has been used widely in the literature to test many different solution methods. This work discusses the modification of particle swarm optimization (PSO) for this problem and compares the performance of this hybrid approach to competing solution methods. PSO produces better results than the currently best-known solution that was achieved using fast guided local search. Combined with our previous results on sub-daily staff scheduling in logistics this result underlines the potential of PSO to solve complex workforce scheduling problems.