A review of technician and task scheduling problems, datasets and solution approaches

This paper aims to provide a review of technician and task scheduling problems. A technician and task scheduling problem requires the creation of timetables for employees in order to serve customers, each having skill requirements. Optimised scheduling can reduce the cost of a workforce and save the employer's significant amount of money whilst maintaining customer and workforce satisfaction. This problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problem. Over the years, many technician and task scheduling problems have been studied. This is due to the real world nature of the problem, that occurs in many industries such as service maintenance, home healthcare, call centres, forest management and housing development projects. Each problem studied has included a diverse range of constraints such as teaming, priority levels, outsourcing, precedence, routing, time windows and tools and spare parts. We present a study of the problems in the literature, datasets and solution approaches. This review aims to identify promising areas for further research such as focusing on multi-period problems, technician unavailability, teaming and precedence constraints.