Many service companies send agents to customers to perform tasks at the customer's location. We study the assignments of self-employed consultants to pharmacies in Germany. For self-employed agents, national law does not allow companies to interfere with the agent's routing decisions. Against this background, we developed a new consultant to pharmacy assignment approach, specifically designed to promote the manual construction of high-quality tours. In an experimental study, we analyze the effect of this approach on human routing performance and compare the performance to traditional assignment approaches. We show that the length of the manually constructed tours can be significantly reduced with our approach.
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Many service companies send agents to customers to perform tasks at the customer's location. We study the assignments of self-employed consultants to pharmacies in Germany. For self-employed agents, national law does not allow companies to interfere with the agent's routing decisions. Against this background, we developed a new consultant to pharmacy assignment approach, specifically designed to promote the manual construction of high-quality tours. In an experimental study, we analyze the effec...
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