A prioritised micro-batch scheduler in rust

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2021-11-25 20:30:08

In this entry I'm going to go through the scheduling problem we had with routing at Surve and how I went about solving it by building the micro-batching scheduler library gaffer.

Surve Mobility provides full-service fleet operations for shared mobility providers, we receive tasks from our customers, for things like charging, cleaning, refilling consumables, etc. Depending on the customer and the task, these are received one-by-one over the course of the day, in daily batches, or in rare cases in monthly batches. Our agents then travel around the city, by foot, with customer vehicles and by public transport fulfilling these tasks. Surve's app delivers tasks to agents, navigates to the tasks, and provides access to actions such as unlocking the doors.

We have a routing algorithm which plans tours of tasks for each active agent, optimising for distance to travel, task priority and deadline, and maintaining invariants such as the tasks an agent is equipped to do, what time of the day they can be done, and whether resources such as charging points are available to use.