Simulation-based evaluation of dispatching policies in service systems

Abstract

A service system is an organization of the resources and processes, which interacts with the customer and produces service outcomes. Since a majority of the service systems are labor-intensive, the main resources are the service workers. Designing such service systems is nontrivial due to a large number of parameters and variations, but crucial for business decisions such as labor staffing. The most important design point of a service system is how and when service requests are assigned to service workers a.k.a. dispatching policy. This paper presents a framework for evaluation of dispatching policies in service systems. A discrete event simulation model of a service system in the data-center management domain is presented. We evaluate four dispatching policies on five real-life service systems. We observe that the simulation-based approach incorporates intricacies of service systems and allows comparative analysis of dispatching policies leading to more accurate decisions on labor staffing. INTRODUCTIONService-based economies and business models have gained significant importance. The clients and service providers exchange value through service interactions and reach service outcomes. Given the focus on the individual customer's value and the uniqueness of the customer's needs, the service providers need to meet a large variety of expectations set by the customers. This is the primary reason for the service delivery to be labor-intensive where human intervention and interaction is unavoidable. Service providers aim to maintain the quality, even in the face of unique customer expectations, by structuring their service delivery operations as service systems (SS). A SS is an organization of the resources that support and the processes that drive service interactions so that the outcomes meet customer expectations (Alter 2008;Spohrer et al. 2007;Ramaswamy and Banavar 2008). This paper focuses on the SS in the data-center management domain. However, the contributions of this paper extend to all laborintensive SS.In the domain of data-center management, the customers own data centers and other IT infrastructures supporting their business. The size, complexity, and uniqueness of the technology installations drive outsourcing of the management responsibilities to specialized service providers. The service providers manage the data-centers from remote locations called delivery centers where groups of service workers (SW) skilled in specific technology areas support corresponding service requests (SR). In each group, the processes, the people, and the customers that drive the operations of a delivery center constitute a SS. A delivery center is a system of multiple SS. This paper focuses on the problem of designing the process of routing the SRs to the right technicians (a.k.a. dispatching policy) within a SS such that certain objectives are achieved and constraints are met. What is the basis for evaluating dispatching policies? We propose that the best dispatching policy is the one that: (1) satisfies the contractual con...

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“…Unlike our model, the system there is not subjected to aggregate SLA constraints and they do not consider preemption of low priority SRs by higher priority SRs and assignment of higher skilled SWs to growing queues of SRs requiring lower skill levels. In (Banerjee et al 2011), a simulation framework for evaluating dispatching policies is proposed. While we share their simulation model, the goal in this paper is to develop simulation optimization methods for optimizing the worker parameter in a constrained setting.…”

“…We use the simulation framework developed in (Banerjee et al 2011) for implementing all our algorithms. A number of dispatching policies have been developed in (Banerjee et al 2011). In particular, we study the PRIO-PULL and EDF policies for performance comparisons of the various algorithms.…”

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“…On a strategic and longterm horizon this includes districting of the installed base into decoupled territories which that are covered by a common a set of resources for a certain service [7,10], the definition of skill sets for technicians and the right target mix in the workforce [11,12], as well as the selection of locations for facilities [13]. Mid-term process design, including the definition of dispatching rules for the assignment of tickets to technicians [14,15], and capacity, e.g. manpower and inventory, planning for each location becomes relevant [7].…”