Dispatching prioritized jobs at multiple locations to workers

A method comprised of:

• providing access to job data comprising a priority level, skills required and a job location for each of a plurality of jobs;
• providing access to resource data comprising skills, a resource location for each of a plurality of workers, a maximum number of locations that each worker of said plurality of workers can visit within a predefined period of time, and a number of available workers of said plurality of workers;
• determining via an optimization engine a first maximum number of jobs of a first priority level that can be assigned to one or more of said plurality of workers, said determination being made by assigning a decision variable xtj a value of 1 when job j of the plurality of jobs of the first priority level is assigned to worker t of the available workers and a value of 0 otherwise for each of the plurality of jobs of the first priority level and available workers and minimizing a summation of xtj for each of jobs j and workers t;
• and
• generating assignments via the optimization engine of said one or more workers to specific ones of said plurality of jobs, said specific jobs totaling said first maximum number of jobs, and said assignment generation being constrained to assign said one or more workers while minimizing total travel time between the resource locations of assigned workers and respective assigned job locations.

A computer program product comprising:

• a non-transitory computer readable memory having computer readable code embodied therein, for execution by a computing device having at least a processor and a memory, said code comprising:
• a first executable code portion configured to provide access to job data comprising a priority level, skills required and a job location for each of a plurality of jobs;
• a second executable code portion configured to provide access to resource data comprising skills, a resource location for each of a plurality of workers, a maximum number of locations that each worker of said plurality of workers can visit within a predefined period of time, and a number of available workers of said plurality of workers;
• a third executable code portion configured to determine a first maximum number of jobs of a first priority level that can be assigned to one or more of said plurality of workers, said determination being made based at least in part on minimizing:
• in which t is a set of available workers, j is a set of the plurality of jobs of the first priority level, and xtj is a decision variable that is assigned a value of 1 if job j is assigned to worker t and is 0 otherwise;
• a fourth executable code portion configured to generate assignments of said one or more workers to specific ones of said plurality of jobs, said specific jobs totaling said first maximum number of jobs, and said assignment optimization being constrained to assign said one or more workers while minimizing total travel time between the resource locations of assigned workers and respective assigned job locations.