Spring 2009 Seminar Series

DATE: March 19th
LOCATION: E51-376
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the ORC ConferenceRoom, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Noah Gans

TITLE
Accounting for Arrival-Rate Uncertainty in Call-Center Workforce Scheduling

ABSTRACT
Arrivals of customers to call centers and other consumer systems are often doubly stochastic. A number of recent papers have formulated specific forecasting, stochastic-programming, and recourse models to account for arrival-rate uncertainty when scheduling agents. Each paper tends to focus on a portion of the problem, however, rather than its full range. As a result, it remains unclear which tools are of most value or exactly how the tools should be used together. In this research, we develop an integrated solution of the problem which allows us to assess the benefit of the various tools, and we apply our models to two sets of call-center data. Our results suggest that one size does not necessarily fit all.

 

Joint work with Haipeng Shen, Yong-Pin Zhou, Alan McCord, Nikolay Korolev, and Herbert Ristock.
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