Developing staff schedules for a bilingual telecommunication call center with flexible workers

Optimization of task allocation and knowledge workers scheduling based-on particle swarm optimization

“…One type of research objects is homogeneous skilled workers, which is mainly concentrated in nurse scheduling 4 , staff scheduling for call centers 5 , home care workers scheduling 6 , aircraft routing and crew scheduling 7 , etc. The common characteristics of the above researches: homogeneous skilled workers take on homogeneous tasks; staffing process does not involve task allocation, only include workers scheduling.…”

Performance estimation of an email contact center by a finite source discrete time Geo/Geo/1 queue with disasters

“…Most of the queuing systems models used to analyze call centers considered them to operate in a continuous time manner (see comprehensive surveys of Aksin, Armony, &Mehro-tra,Mehr and Gans, Koole, & Mandelbaum, 2003). In a more recent work on developing staff schedules in call centers with flexible workers, Ertogral and Bamuqabel (2008) obtained agent requirements in each hour across a week using a queuing approximation model of M/M/S. It's true that some studies actually benefits from discrete time modeling as a useful tool in modeling call canters that has important advantages over the usual analytical approaches to solve the quantitative queue models of call centers (see for example Chassioti & Worthington, 2004).…”

Workforce planning incorporating skills: State of the art

“…While uncertainty is ubiquitous, it remains a very popular topic for the future research section of many papers. [7,54,58,69,71,76,86,88,98,99,104,105,107,113,120] Most papers that consider a stochastic problem account for the uncertainty in demand [7,54,58,69,71,76,86,88,98,99,104,107,113]. Furthermore, the required workload and required processing time for tasks can be stochastic as elaborated by Stratman et al [105] and Huang et al [76].…”

“…An increase in the number of decision variables usually leads to an increased complexity and required computation time. Ertogral and Bamuqabel [54] demonstrate this by comparing a staff scheduling problem with and without skills.…”

“…They assume that in practice a given agent often works more efficiently (faster) when handling a smaller number of call types (i.e., if his/her skill set is artificially reduced). Ertogral and Bamuqabel [54], however, do not incorporate any disadvantages of flexible cross-trained workers in their model to solve a similar workforce planning problem in a call center.…”