Programmed Automatic Customer Engineer (PACE) Dispatch

An experimental real-time system is described for assigning customer engineers (servicemen) to requests for service, preventive maintenance and engineering- and sales-change activities. The system, which can be applied to service organizations of many kinds, is viewed as a stochastic programming formulation. The resultant mathematical programming problem is structured as a control system, an inner control loop and an outer adaptive feedback loop in which system parameters are adjusted based on a performance index. Tests of the system have been made using data from the Brooklyn, New York and Washington, D.C. IBM Field Engineering Division branch offices.