Online scheduling policies for multiclass call centers with impatient customers |
| |
Authors: | Oualid Jouini Auke Pot Ger Koole Yves Dallery |
| |
Affiliation: | 1. Laboratoire Génie Industriel, Ecole Centrale Paris, Grande Voie des Vignes, 92290 Chatenay-Malabry, France;2. CCmath, Catharina van Clevelaan 2, 1181 BH Amstelveen, The Netherlands;3. Department of Mathematics, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;4. Rouen Business School, Boulevard André Siegfried, 76130 Mont-Saint-Aignan, France |
| |
Abstract: | We consider a call center with two classes of impatient customers: premium and regular classes. Modeling our call center as a multiclass GI/GI/s+M queue, we focus on developing scheduling policies that satisfy a target ratio constraint on the abandonment probabilities of premium customers to regular ones. The problem is inspired by a real call center application in which we want to reach some predefined preference between customer classes for any workload condition. The motivation for this constraint comes from the difficulty of predicting in a quite satisfying way the workload. In such a case, the traditional routing problem formulation with differentiated service levels for different customer classes would be useless. For this new problem formulation, we propose two families of online scheduling policies: queue joining and call selection policies. The principle of our policies is that we adjust their routing rules by dynamically changing their parameters. We then evaluate the performance of these policies through a numerical study. The policies are characterized by simplicity and ease of implementation. |
| |
Keywords: | Call centers Queueing systems Abandonments Online scheduling policies |
本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录! |
|