Treffer: Assessing Feasibility in Service Teams Transport Scheduling with Dedicated and Flexible Dispatch Approaches.

Featured Application: The proposed approach can be applied to the task planning and dispatching of mobile service teams operating within critical infrastructure sectors such as energy, telecommunications, transportation, and emergency response. In these domains, ensuring feasible schedules under varying service time windows, differing levels of service criticality, and the need for flexible allocation of vehicles and personnel is essential. The developed feasibility assessment supports decision-makers in selecting between dedicated and flexible dispatch strategies to improve operational reliability and resource utilization. The research problem addressed in this paper concerns the formulation of feasibility conditions for planned service missions in networks where fulfilling customer orders requires the coordinated participation of multiple resources—referred to as the Service Teams Transport Scheduling (STTS) problem. The study examines feasibility conditions (sufficient and necessary) for routing and scheduling mobile service teams, taking into account constraints arising from service time windows arrangement, vehicle and team availability, and the applied vehicle dispatching strategies. Due to the NP-hard nature of the problem, which limits the possibility of determining service distribution plans in real time, it becomes essential to develop necessary feasibility conditions that can be used in preliminary tests prior to the final search for a feasible service mission plan. By introducing a graph-based representation of time-window arrangement, the study establishes necessary feasibility conditions derived from chromatic number analysis of the corresponding graphs. The feasibility verification approach, based on these conditions, was validated through a series of experiments. The approach combines discrete optimization and declarative modeling to support algorithmic decision-making in real-world service logistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Applied Sciences (2076-3417) is the property of MDPI and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)