Smarter Technician Routing Cuts Drive Time and Lifts Daily Job Throughput

Any HVAC shop owner who has stood behind a dispatcher at 7 a.m. knows the problem. Six techs, 22 calls, three of them urgent, one of them requires a refrigerant certification the Tuesday guy doesn't have, and somebody's contract-labor partner wants to know if there's anything in the north end. Research in the European Journal of Operational Research (2024) takes that exact mess and models it.

Authors Nowak and Szufel built an optimization model for dispatching technicians with different skill sets to customer sites. When the algorithm accounts for tech-specific skills, customer time windows, and availability of contract labor, the resulting routes meaningfully reduce travel time and raise jobs completed per day. The improvements scale with fleet size. Small shops with 4 to 6 techs see modest gains. Shops with 15 or more see larger ones because the combinatorial complexity grows fast.

The research doesn't promise magic. It promises that the boring discipline of modeling constraints — which tech can do what, when customers can receive service, which subcontractors are available — produces better schedules than a dispatcher working from intuition.

Why Most Shops Leave Money on the Road

A typical residential HVAC dispatcher plans routes by geography and appointment time. That's the basic layer. Skill matching usually gets handled by labeling "senior" versus "junior" techs and trying to send the right one. Contract labor is handled by texting the partner company when the board looks full. None of these are wrong, but the research suggests they leave significant efficiency on the table compared to a constrained optimization model that considers all three jointly.

The gains show up in two places. First, drive time. Routes that consider skill and time windows alongside geography tend to cluster tighter, which cuts windshield time. Second, completed jobs per day. Fewer reassignments mid-morning because the dispatched tech didn't have the right certification or the customer wasn't home.

For a shop paying California tech labor at 50-plus dollars an hour loaded, even a 10-percent reduction in drive time and a half-job-per-tech-per-day increase in throughput is material. The research suggests well-tuned optimization produces gains in that range.

What a Small Shop Actually Does With This

The research isn't asking contractors to build their own solver. Most modern field service platforms — ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, FieldEdge, and the major BMS integrators — now offer constraint-aware routing. The question is whether your shop has actually configured those features or is using the platform as a glorified calendar.

The two practical moves. First, build out a skill matrix in whatever dispatch platform you run. Every tech's certifications, brand training, and specialty work, tagged at the technician level. Second, define your time windows honestly. Customers who say "anytime" and customers who say "before 2 p.m. or I'm not home" shouldn't carry the same dispatch weight. The routing engine can't optimize constraints it doesn't see.

Contract labor is the third lever the paper flags. Shops that treat overflow subcontractors as a last-minute text chain are losing the optimization. Building their availability into the schedule the night before gives the engine a fuller set of options.

Dispatchers who bring years of shop knowledge aren't going away. The research isn't replacing them. It's giving them a better tool to work with than a whiteboard and a gut feel — which is what more than half the HVAC shops in California still run on in 2026.

More on the operations side: fleet management for appliance repair and our contractor software reviews expansion.

Source

Nowak, Maciej and Przemysław Szufel (2024). "Technician routing and scheduling for the sharing economy." European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 314, No. 1, pp. 15–31. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/european-journal-of-operational-research