Joline Uichanco

 

We work with a local gas operations company which has more than twenty “yards” all over New England. Each yard is composed of maintenance crews that serve several neighborhoods doing pre-planned work and replacements of pipelines. However, these crews also need to service an unforeseen number of emergency gas leaks might be called in throughout the day. These leaks need to be addressed immediately because they can potentially ignite and cause an explosion. Previously, each yard would manually schedule and assign the work. However, with a manual system, yards have often been inundated with urgent leaks and paid large overtime hour charges as a result.

We model the problem as a two stage integer programming problem. The first stage solves for the schedule of the pre-planned work for a given month. The second stage assigns the work to the available crews. Preliminary results have been promising in reducing the number of overtime hours claimed by the crews by as much as 20%.