Team planning under an electricity failure for a GSM operator

Abstract

Base stations are very important for all GSM operators. Efficient base stations prevent income loss while bringing prestige to the company. This study deals with the problem of transportation planning of portable generators during electricity failure for a leading Turkish GSM operator. There are often electricity failures in a particular area of Mersin which cause not only customer complaints but also income loss for the company. After an electricity failure, a battery steps in for that station. However, the lifetime of battery is limited and sometimes not enough during the failure. In that case, a fixed generator could step in to give service properly. Unfortunately, because of the high cost of fixed generators, not all base stations have a fixed generator. Therefore, the company tries to interfere this problem by using limited number of portable generators. Field operation teams transport and set up these portable generators to the sites with electricity failure before the battery dies. The problem is to schedule the transportation of portable generators to the base stations with electricity failure. In this study, composite dispatching rule, one of the scheduling algorithms, is used to solve this planning problem effectively. An Excel based decision support system has been developed for field operation team. Whenever a failure occurs, after inputting necessary information to the Excel, transportation schedule for each team could be easily obtained by the company experts.