05638489

j

05638489 Pisacane, Ornella Agent scheduling in a multiskill call center. 4OR 7, No. 2, 199-202 (2009). 2009 Springer, Heidelberg EN call center integer programming linear programming scheduling problem

doi:10.1007/s10288-008-0078-4

Summary: This is a summary of the author's PhD thesis, supervised by Pierre L'Ecuyer and Roberto Musmanno and defended on 21 February 2008 at the Universit\`a della Calabria. The thesis is written in English and is available from the author upon request. This work deals with the comparison of simulation-based algorithms for solving the agents scheduling problem in a multiskill call center minimizing their costs under service levels constraints. A solution approach, combining simulation, with integer or linear programming, and cut generation, is proposed. Considering realistic problems, it performs better than the two-step approach proposed in the literature. It is also shown that a randomized search, extending the one defined for the single-period staffing problem in {\it A. N. Avramidis, W. Chan} and {\it P. L'Ecuyer} [Staffing multi-skill call centers via search methods and a performance approximation, IIE Trans. (in press) (2008)], yields highly suboptimal solutions. Finally, an extension of the cutting plane method to directly control the probability on the customers abandonments is designed.