Telephone Call Centers: Asymptotic Optimality of Myopic Forecasting-Scheduling Scheme

• Activity Number: 113
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Business and Economic Statistics Section
• Author(s): Han Ye*
• Companies: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Keywords: Workforce schedules ; stochastic programs ; abandonment constraint

Abstract

We determine workforce schedules for call center arrivals that are doubly stochastic. Period-by-period arrival rates follow a hidden AR(1) process, and only arrival counts are observed. We formulate stochastic programs to minimize long-run average staffing costs, subject to a long-run average constraint on abandonment. We show that, in steady state, repeated, myopic solution of the single-period problem is stable, has low cost, and meets the abandonment constraint.