Optimal answer for the problem of a multi-skill call center

Question

What is the summary of the research papaer journal attempts to find an optimal solution for the problem of a multi-skill call center ?

Answer 1

This research journal attempts to find an optimal solution for the problem of a multi-skill call center. The article introduced a couple of approaches to solve the problem. The goal of this problem is to minimize the operating cost of the centre (objective function) under a set of constraint, which is usually some parameters defining the quality of the service. Instead of minimizing the general case of dynamic routing scheme, this article optimizes the staffing or scheduling as the dynamic schemes are too difficult to implement. In this paper, the aim of the solution is to offer optimal staffing or scheduling strategies based on stochastic arrival of calls to minimize the operating cost of the centre. The quality of service constraints are the percentage of calls within a pre-defined time limit, which is called the service level. Another type of constraint can be an upper bound on the abandonment ratio or other types of performance constraints.

This paper extends the previous work of Gans et al (2003) and the general methodology suggested by Atlason et al (2004) on solving the optimal solution of the problem. This paper extends the framework proposed by Atlason et al (2004) and explored the difficulties when the scale of the problem becomes large.

The paper is structured as below. The first part of the paper outlined the optimization problem and offered a brief literature review on previous work done on this topic. The second part of the paper formulated the problem by defining the objective function and the solution method was introduced in the third part of the paper. The forth part of the paper explained a couple of difficulties faced by this methodology and numerical experiments were conducted to the test the solution method. The last section of the paper concluded the paper and gave direction for further research.