Take Risks into Consideration while Job Dispatching

To deal with the uncertainty of job dispatching in mobile workforce manage­ ment, we have proposed a framework, Risk-Oriented joB dispAtching for mo- biLe workforce system (ROBALO) (Cha et al., 2005), to ease the tension be­ tween (a) the reliability requirement to serve a job request, and (b) the cost of the job's assignment. In ROBALO, the risks for workers to execute a job are taken into consideration. Such consideration is especially useful in the scenario of mobile workforce management because mobile workers usually meet unex­ pected situations in the field. Therefore, we can find the job assignment with the minimum cost under a certain degree of risk. Therefore, the job dispatcher can reserve enough resources and make enough preparations for a incident. Our previous work focuses on the scenario of online job dispatching, which chooses a worker or a working group to serve every incoming job request independently. In this article, we further extend to the batch model and propose a sub-optimal approach for batch job dispatching to form a complete framework.