Development of an Algorithm for Optimum Allocation of Multiple Teams to Borehole Drilling Sites

Abstract

This research focuses on the allocation of teams to complete a set of time duration predefined borehole investigation jobs. An algorithm was developed, to output which team does which jobs and when. Initially, filtering the job list was done to group similar type of jobs together. Clustering the two dimensional drilling sites to a given number of teams were done to separate the jobs among the drilling teams. The total service time duration differences of the outcome drilling site clusters were minimized to a given accepted difference level by iteratively shifting jobs from the cluster, which has maximum total service time duration. The distance matrix of each drilling site locations cluster was modified by adding the ‘office location’ and replacing ‘big M’ values for main diagonal distances of each outcome cluster and, sent through the Hungarian method. The graphical representations of obtained sub routes were taken as a guide for designing of the shortest path of each clustered drilling sites. The developed algorithm was shown better optimization over the traditional practice of ‘instant team allocation for the nearest location’.