Robust Approach To Staffing And Scheduling Problems For Call Center

With market competition becoming more and more fierce,modern enterprises should not only provide high-quality customized products,but also provide more satisfactory service.The diversity and randomness of customer needs,and the competition between enterprises being transformed from product competition to service competition gradually,make the research quality and efficient service mode become the focus of the enterprise management as well as academia.Call center has increasingly become the common of all walks of life to provide customer service,in majority of call center,the cost of human resources accounts for more than 50%?60%for the whole operating costs.Therefore,it is particularly significant to study effective personnel work plan.This paper is based on the national natural science fund project.It researches around two key problems in the study of operation management,staffing and scheduling problems.By finding the deficiency of traditional method for study of uncertain problems,robust method is proposed to improve the staffing model and scheduling model,and eventually to make staffing model reduce the impact of random customer arrival rate,scheduling model resist uncertainty personnel demand.The main work of this paper includes the following three aspects:the first one is modeling the fluid discrete model of call center staffing model,and the model uses IBM ILOG CPLEX 12.4 software to solve,and the result finds that the model can only solve the problem of certain,while for the uncertainty customer arrival,it can not solve.While the uncertain customer arrival will influence the model to a large extend.As a result,robust method is presented to improve the fluid model.The second one is modeling the simulation queue model to the staffing model,using Visual Studio 2012 software,and coding in C++ to implement the simulation model,simulation results verify the feasibility of fluid model,and the effectiveness of robust approach.Finally,in view of the call center scheduling problem,we design the shift of call center,and set up with rest time window scheduling model,and then considering the uncertain demand for staffing,we use robust optimization method to improve the scheduling model.IBM ILOG 12.4 software is used to solve the model,and verify the effectiveness of robust scheduling model.Robust approach,which is used to study the uncertain problem will become one of the significant research direction in the future.The article uses the adjustable robust approach to reduce the effect of uncertain arrival rate and uncertainty staffing demand to call center system.The results of this paper will provide a comprehensively theoretical reference and support to an actual operation of call center.In addition,due to the management of call center operation belonging to a service field,the method and thought of the paper are easy to transplant to other service field.