Telecommunications systems maintenance

This paper focuses on telecommunications systems maintenance with a view to investigating new work load assignment techniques that potentially integrate related maintenance operations. The integration of maintenance tasks with differing complexities is achieved using the concept of a "Universal Technician". The telecommunication maintenance system is essentially modeled as an acyclic network of G|G|M - FCFS queues with Markov routing and non-stationary arrivals. Since such a network is typically intractable even under renewal approximations, a discrete event simulation model is employed. The alternatives, namely, the current operations and the proposed integrated operations, are compared in terms of manpower requirements and service levels. The economic analysis of the alternatives reveals a significant long term savings in integrating the maintenance operations.