Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Dimensioning Large Call Centers
Operations Research
Dynamic Routing in Large-Scale Service Systems with Heterogeneous Servers
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
A Staffing Algorithm for Call Centers with Skill-Based Routing
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Service-Level Differentiation in Call Centers with Fully Flexible Servers
Management Science
Scheduling Flexible Servers with Convex Delay Costs in Many-Server Service Systems
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Queue-and-Idleness-Ratio Controls in Many-Server Service Systems
Mathematics of Operations Research
Queue-and-Idleness-Ratio Controls in Many-Server Service Systems
Mathematics of Operations Research
Service Interruptions in Large-Scale Service Systems
Management Science
Fair Dynamic Routing in Large-Scale Heterogeneous-Server Systems
Operations Research
Control of systems with flexible multi-server pools: a shadow routing approach
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
State Space Collapse in Many-Server Diffusion Limits of Parallel Server Systems
Mathematics of Operations Research
A Fluid Approximation for Service Systems Responding to Unexpected Overloads
Operations Research
Shadow-Routing Based Control of Flexible Multiserver Pools in Overload
Operations Research
Overflow Networks: Approximations and Implications to Call Center Outsourcing
Operations Research
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
A Fluid Limit for an Overloaded X Model via a Stochastic Averaging Principle
Mathematics of Operations Research
On the numerical solution of Kronecker-based infinite level-dependent QBD processes
Performance Evaluation
Queues with skill based parallel servers and a FCFS infinite matching model
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
Diffusion approximation for an overloaded X model via a stochastic averaging principle
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
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Motivated by telephone call centers, we study large-scale service systems with multiple customer classes and multiple agent pools, each with many agents. To minimize staffing costs subject to service-level constraints, where we delicately balance the service levels (SLs) of the different classes, we propose a family of routing rules called fixed-queue-ratio (FQR) rules. With FQR, a newly available agent next serves the customer from the head of the queue of the class (from among those he is eligible to serve) whose queue length most exceeds a specified proportion of the total queue length. The proportions can be set to achieve desired SL targets. The FQR rule achieves an important state-space collapse (SSC) as the total arrival rate increases, in which the individual queue lengths evolve as fixed proportions of the total queue length. In the current paper we consider a variety of service-level types and exploit SSC to construct asymptotically optimal solutions for the staffing-and-routing problem. The key assumption in the current paper is that the service rates depend only on the agent pool.