First Friday Webinars – How BT is using OR to make sustainable impact in resource management

Presented by Dr. Anne Liret, Research Manager (British Telecommunications)

In the face of the climate emergency, several measures are being taken to move to more sustainable sources of energy. The transport sector has increasingly adopted Electric Vehicles (EVs) in order to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. This has led to the necessity of accounting for these technologies in the area of field services delivery. In particular BT Research have been developing technical solutions to support the introduction of EV into their large fleet operations. This led to new models to plan for new EV chargers deployment minimising the energy risk, and then to schedule jobs and charge activities of electric vehicles in the feasible operational manner for field engineers while minimising the productivity impact.

By optimising the infrastructure, the required investment can be determined as well as minimising the disruption to the operations caused by the rollout of the new VE fleet and infrastructure can be minimised. As usual in operational research applied to decision-making support, the measuring of the impact on real-case trials is key to make sure changes adoption is going smoothly.