Service order dispatching in electric utilities

Managing the staff to carry out service orders related to electric power distribution systems usually requires high available maintenance teams to execute those typical procedures, some of them with strict defined deadlines established by agency regulators. Additionally, this amount of orders often demand even more resources than those available on the utilities. In this scenario, there is a promise scope to be explored in order to improve productivity of teams in the sense that the time spent in the route is reduced. The methodology proposed in this paper defined this problem as the well-known capacitated clustering problem and includes a heuristic algorithm to cluster even hundreds of orders in reasonable execution times. Actual instances from a utility have shown the suitability of the proposed algorithm.