Dynamic workforce management

Provision of service to business and residential customers, network maintenance and fault repair are some of the core activities of large telecommunications companies which involve thousands of technicians everyday. BT has developed a fully automated system for its workforce management called Work Manager. Work Manager has led to efficient and effective utilisation of the BT workforce. The system is capable of monitoring changes in resource and work profiles, reacting to them when necessary to maintain the feasibility and optimality of work schedules. We review the architecture and the functionalities of Work Manager. We focus on the scheduling component-called the Dynamic Scheduler-which combines artificial intelligence and optimisation techniques to generate and implement long-term schedules for field-technicians.