Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with skill sets and time windows at Frontier Technologies

Frontier technologies, a sister company of Kerr Group of Companies, is a sub-contractor for major utilityservice providers across Canada providing service in: Mobilized workforce, voice and data cabling, securityand wireless structure. This research will provide the Frontier technologies with a planning optimization modeland tool that finds the optimal or near optimal solution to the technician job assignment and routing problem ina way that company's cost (or time) of executing the contracted installations is minimized with respect to allconstraints of the installation jobs and the technicians' skills.The problem at hand is a special case of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with skill sets and time windowsconstraints. Variations of VRP, like the one at Frontier technologies, have several other requirements andconstraints specific to the problem which adds to the complexity of the solution. In this research, Mixed IntegerLinear Programming (MILP) models and appropriate heuristic or Meta-Heuristic models will be developed toaddress the technician planning problem at Frontier Technologies. At the end of the project, producedsoftware/programs during the project and usage instructions will be transferred to the company. Requiredtraining to use the software also will be provided by the research team.The results of the research will bepublished in peer-review journals and conferences.