Staffing a call center with uncertain arrival rate and absenteeism

Production and Operations Management

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 88-102

  Whitt, Ward ^a  

^a Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science   (United States)

Author keywords

Contact centers; Customer abandonment; Employee absenteeism; Fluid models; Model parameter uncertainty

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645559049     PISSN: 10591478     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1937-5956.2006.tb00005.x     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Altman, E., T. Jiménez, G. Koole. 2001. On the comparison of queueing systems with their fluid limits. Prob. Eng. Inf. Sci. 15(2) 165-178.
2. Avramidis, A. N., A. Deslauriers, P. L'Ecuyer. 2004. Modeling daily arrivals to a telephone call center. Management Science 50(7) 896-908.
3. Baccelli, F., G. Hebuterne. 1981, On queues with impatient customers in Performance '81, F. J. Kylstra (ed.). North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 159-179.
4. Bassamboo, A., A. Zeevi, J. M. Harrison. 2006a. Design and control of a large call center: asymptotic analysis of an LP-based method. Operations Research. Forthcoming.
5. Bassamboo, A., A. Zeevi, J. M. Harrison. 2006b. Dynamic routing and admission control in high-volume service systems: asymptotic analysis via multi-scale fluid limits. Queueing Systems Forthcoming.
6. Ben-Tal, A., A. Nemirovski. 2000. Robust solutions of linear programming problems contaminated with uncertain data. Mathematical Programming 88(3) 411-424.
7. Borst, S., A. Mandelbaum, M. I. Reiman. 2004. Dimensioning large call centers. Operations Research 52(1) 17-34.
8. Brandt, A., M. Brandt. 1999. On the M(n)/M(n)/s queue with impatient calls. Performance Evaluation 35(1) 1-18.
9. Brandt, A., M. Brandt. 2002. Asymptotic results and a Markovian approximation for the M(n)/M(n)/s + GI system. Queueing Systems 41(1-2) 73-94.
10. Brown, L. D., N. Gans, A. Mandelbaum, A. Sakov, H. Shen, S. Zeltyn, L. Zhao. 2005. Statistical analysis of a telephone call center: A queueing-science perspective. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 100(1) 36-50.
11. Browne, S., W. Whitt. 1995. Piecewise-linear diffusion processes in Advances in queueing, J. Dshalalow (ed.). CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 463-480.
12. Feldman, Z., A. Mandelbaum, W. A. Massey, W. Whitt. 2005. Staffing of time-varying queues to achieve time-stable performance. Management Science, forthcoming. Available at http://Columbia.edu/~ww2040.
13. Gans, N., G. Koole, A. Mandelbaum. 2003. Telephone call centers: Tutorial, review and research prospects. Manufacturing and Service Opns. Mgmt. 5(2) 79-141.
14. Garnett, O., A. Mandelbaum, M. I. Reiman. 2002. Designing a call center with impatient customers. Manufacturing and Service Opns. Mgmt. 4(3) 208-227.
15. Green, L., P. Kolesar. 1991. The pointwise stationary approximation for queues with nonstationary arrivals. Management Science 37(1) 84-97.
16. Green, L. V., P. J. Kolesar, W. Whitt. 2005. Coping with time-varying demand when setting staffing requirements for a service system. Production and Operations Management, forthcoming. Available at http://columbia.edu/~ww2040.
17. Harrison, J. M., A. Zeevi. 2005. A method for staffing large call centers based on stochastic fluid models. Manufacturing and Service Management 7(1) 20-36.
18. Helton, J. C., D. E. Burmaster. 1996. Treatment of Aleatory and Epistemic Uncertainty, Special issue of Reliability Engineering and System Safety 54(2-3) 91-262.
19. Henderson, S. G. 2003. Input model uncertainty: Why do we care and what should we do about it? in Proceedings 2003 Winter Simulation Conference, S. Chick, P. J. Sanchez, D. Ferrin and D. J. Morrice (eds.), 90-100.
20. Jennings, O. B., A. Mandelbaum, W. A. Massey, W. Whitt. 1996. Server staffing to meet time-varying demand. Management Science 42(10) 1383-1394.
21. Jiménez, T., G. Koole. 2004. Scaling and comparison of fluid limits of queues applied to call centers with time-varying parameters. OR Spectrum 26(3) 413-422.
22. Jongbloed, G., G. Koole. 2001. Managing uncertainty in call centers using Poisson mixtures. Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry 17(4) 307-318.
23. Mandelbaum, A., W. A. Massey, M. I. Reiman. 1998. Strong approximations for Markovian service networks. Queueing Systems 30(1-2) 149-201.
24. th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 16), P. Key, D. Smith (eds.).
25. Mandelbaum, A., S. Zeltyn. 2004. The impact of customers patience on delay and abandonment: some empirically-driven experiments with the M/M/n + G queue. OR Spectrum 26(3) 377-411.
26. Massey, W. A., W. Whitt. 1998. Uniform acceleration expansions for Markov chains with time-varying rates. Ann. Appl. Prob. 8(4) 1130-1155.
27. Müller, A., D. Stoyan. 2002. Comparison Methods for stochastic models and risks. Wiley, New York, New York.
28. Palm, C. 1943. Intensity variations in telephon traffic, in German, Ericsson Technics 44. Translated into English, North-Holland, 1988.
29. Plum, R. R. 1986. History of traffic measurement in the Bell system. Dickpat Publications, Red Bank, New Jersey.
30. Porteus, E. L. 1990. Stochastic inventory theory. Ch. 12 in Stochastic Models, Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science 2, D. P. Heyman, M. J. Sobel (eds.), North-Holland, 605-652.
31. Ross, A. M. 2001. Queueing systems with daily cycles and stochastic demand with uncertain parameters. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, California.
32. Shen, H., J. Z. Huang. 2005. Analysis of call center data using singular value decomposition. Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry 21(3) 251-263.
33. Steckley, S. G., S. G. Henderson, V. Mehrotra. 2004. Service system planning in the presence of random arrival rate. Working paper, Cornell University.
34. van Mieghem, J. A. 2003. Capacity management, investment and hedging: Review and recent developments. Manufacturing and Service Management 5(4) 269-302.
35. Ward, A. R., P. W. Glynn. 2003. A diffusion approximation for a Markovian queue with reneging. Queueing Systems 43(1-2) 103-128.
36. t/s queues is asymptotically correct as the rates increase. Management Science 37(3) 307-314.
37. Whitt, W. 1999. Dynamic staffing in a telephone call center aiming to immediately answer all calls. Operations Research Letters 24(5) 205-212.
38. Whitt, W. 2002. Stochastic-Process Limits. Springer, New York, New York.
39. Whitt, W. 2004. Efficiency-driven heavy-traffic approximations for many-server queues with abandonments. Management Sci. 50 1449-1461.
40. Whitt, W. 2005a. Engineering solution of a basic call-center model. Management Sci. 51(2) 221-235.
41. Whitt, W. 2005b. Two fluid approximations for multi-server queues with abandonments. Operations Research Letters 33(4) 363-372.
42. Whitt, W. 2006a, Fluid models for multiserver queues with abandonments. Operations Research 54(1) 37-54.
43. Whitt, W. 2006b. Sensitivity of performance in the Erlang A model to changes in the model parameters. Operations Research. Forth-coming. Available at http://columbia.edu/~ww2040.
44. Zeltyn, S., A. Mandelbaum. 2005. Call centers with impatient customers: Many-server asymptotics of the M/M/n + G queue. Available at http://iew3.technion.ac.il/serveng/References-.references.html.
45. Zohar, E., A. Mandelbaum, N. Shimkin. 2002. Adaptive behavior of impatient customers in tele-queues: theory and empirical support. Management Science 48(4) 566-583.