A continuous dispatch decision model for sustainable IT service assignments

Abstract

Information technology (IT) services are indispensable in the enterprises' sustainability program nowadays. For the outsourcing of IT services, many companies use the contract service model and set up a project to implement timely IT requests which constantly arrive at different IT sites. The demand for outsourced IT services and related workforce coordination is a permanent decisional process, yet existing studies mainly focus on the one-time assignment or the centralized service model. Hence, this paper bases on the multi-period and multi-service allocation requirement to develop a sustainable assignment model. The model handles continuous service requests and decentralized worker assignments to optimize overall costs under the fixed-price contract type of IT service. A real industrial service case is reported to illustrate the model. A comparative review with related works is also provided to discuss the contributions of the model and to outline its future research and development.