Ye, Xin, Tang, Loon Ching, Ye, Zhisheng, and Shen, Lijuan (2026) Priority assignment of repair services for spatially distributed infrastructure. IISE Transactions, 58 (5). pp. 503-517.

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Abstract

Critical infrastructure, such as telecom base stations, comprises spatially distributed facilities that alternate between operational and down states. When the facilities are down, service engineers need to travel to the site to repair and restore them to operation. In the event of a disruption, multiple facilities might be down. However, repair priorities are often assigned on an ad hoc basis, leading to suboptimal decisions. This paper studies the optimal repair priority policy for a service engineer managing facilities within their service region. We formulate a continuous-time Markov decision process for optimal decision-making. We show that the famous cl-rule in the job scheduling literature is not optimal for assigning repair priorities in our setting. For the general case, we identify certain facilities that should always be prioritized over others when they are down and determine the optimal repair priority at some system states. Nevertheless, a full characterization of the optimal policy structure of the general case is intractable due to its complexity. We identify three special cases where the optimal policy structure exhibits an index structure, referred to as the cl=k-rule. By combining these structural properties with the famous cl-rule, we develop an index-based heuristic. Numerical experiments, based on a telecom base station failure dataset from Qiqihar, China, demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic in a variety of settings, including non-Markovian system dynamics.

Item ID:	91173
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2472-5862
Copyright Information:	Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Date Deposited:	14 Apr 2026 00:28
FoR Codes:	40 ENGINEERING > 4099 Other engineering > 409999 Other engineering not elsewhere classified @ 100%
SEO Codes:	19 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY, CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATURAL HAZARDS > 1904 Natural hazards > 190499 Natural hazards not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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