The technician routing problem with experience-based service times

•Model multi-period technician routing problem with experience-based learning.•Explicitly modeling learning and workforce heterogeneity impact solutions.•Taking advantage of the capacity of fast learners is important.•Technicians specialize more when they have less experience.

While home services are a fast growing industry, little attention has been given to the management of its workforce. In particular, the productivity of home-service technicians depends not only on efficiently routing from customer-to-customer, but also the management of their skillsets. This paper introduces a model of technician routing that explicitly models individualized, experience-based learning. The results demonstrate that explicit modeling and the resulting ability to capture changes in productivity over time due to learning lead to significantly better and different solutions than those found when learning and workforce heterogeneity is ignored. We show that these differences result from the levels of specialization that occur in the workforce.