Related papers: Call center service times are lognormal. A Fokker-…

In recent years it has been increasing evidence that lognormal distributions are widespread in physical and biological sciences, as well as in various phenomena of economics and social sciences. In social sciences, the appearance of…

The directed network of telephone subscribers is considered in the article. It can be described as a dynamic network with vertices that correspond to the subscribers of the telephone network and emerging directional edges that correspond to…

This paper addresses a fundamental and practically significant problem in call centre operations -- determining optimal call allocation policies that meet client service targets while minimising staffing costs. Motivated by a problem…

We analyze call center data on properties such as agent heterogeneity, customer patience and breaks. Then we compare simulation models that are different in the ways these properties are modeled. We classify them according to the extend in…

Call centers' managers are interested in obtaining accurate point and distributional forecasts of call arrivals in order to achieve an optimal balance between service quality and operating costs. We present a strategy for selecting forecast…

Stochastic network calculus is a theory for stochastic service guarantee analysis of computer communication networks. In the current stochastic network calculus literature, its traffic and server models are typically based on the cumulative…

We present some measurements and ideas for response time statistics in ERP systems. It is shown that the response time distribution of a given transaction in a given system is generically a log-normal distribution or, in some situations, a…

In this paper, we analyze the behavior of a multi-agent system driven by the interactions of agents within a competitive environment. To achieve this, we describe the transition probabilities that underlie the system's stochastic nature. We…

Most existing works on transportation dynamics focus on networks of a fixed structure, but networks whose nodes are mobile have become widespread, such as cell-phone networks. We introduce a model to explore the basic physics of…

In most countries, alcohol consumption distributions have been shown to possess universal features. Their unimodal right-skewed shape is usually modeled in terms of the Lognormal distribution, which is easy to fit, test, and modify.…

Telephone call centers offer a convenient communication channel between businesses and their customers. Efficient management of call centers needs accurate modeling of customer waiting behavior, which contains important information about…

The aim of our research was to apply well-known data mining techniques (such as linear neural networks, multi-layered perceptrons, probabilistic neural networks, classification and regression trees, support vector machines and finally a…

We consider a service system with an infinite number of exponential servers sharing a finite service capacity. The servers are ordered according to their speed, and arriving customers join the fastest idle server. A capacity allocation is…

We consider a stochastic, continuous state and time opinion model where each agent's opinion locally interacts with other agents' opinions in the system, and there is also exogenous randomness. The interaction tends to create clusters of…

The problem of load balancing in a distribution network under unknown time- varying demand and supply is studied. A set of distributed controllers which regulate the amount of flow through the edges is designed to guarantee convergence of…

We study service scheduling problems in a slotted system in which agents arrive with service requests according to a Bernoulli process and have to leave within two slots after arrival, service costs are quadratic in service rates, and there…

A key operational challenge for call centers is to decide, in real time, which waiting customer should be served by which available agent. This is known as skill-based routing, and the decision becomes especially difficult in large systems…

This paper studies a stochastic congested location problem in the network of a service system that consists of facilities to be established in a finite number of candidate locations. Population zones allocated to each open service facility…

In this paper we predict outgoing mobile phone calls using a machine learning approach. We analyze to which extent the activity of mobile phone users is predictable. The premise is that mobile phone users exhibit temporal regularity in…

We consider "time-of-use" pricing as a technique for matching supply and demand of temporal resources with the goal of maximizing social welfare. Relevant examples include energy, computing resources on a cloud computing platform, and…