相关论文: Performance Evaluation of Small Call Centres in a …

We consider the problem of allocating customers to agents in small call centres so that transient performance indicators in terms of expected numbers of losses and abandonments are optimised. To gain insight into the general structure of…

This paper considers a nonstationary multiserver queuing model with abandonment and balking for inbound call centers. We present a continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) model which captures the important characteristics of an inbound call…

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 considers a Markov decision model for profit maximization of a cloud computing service provider catering to customers submitting jobs with firm real-time random deadlines. Customers are charged on a per-job basis, receiving a…

We consider a multi-class queueing model of a telephone call center, in which a system manager dynamically allocates available servers to customer calls. Calls can terminate through either service completion or customer abandonment, and the…

We consider a Markovian single server queue with impatient customers. There is a customer abandonment cost and a holding cost for customers in the system. We consider two versions of the problem. In the first version, customers pay a reward…

This paper investigates a class of optimal control problems associated with Markov processes with local state information. The decision-maker has only local access to a subset of a state vector information as often encountered in…

We consider a discrete-time system comprising a first-come-first-served queue, a non-preemptive server, and a stationary non-work-conserving scheduler. New tasks enter the queue according to a Bernoulli process with a pre-specified arrival…

With the simultaneous rise of energy costs and demand for cloud computing, efficient control of data centers becomes crucial. In the data center control problem, one needs to plan at every time step how many servers to switch on or off in…

Cloud computing enables the dynamic provisioning of server resources. To exploit this opportunity, a policy is needed for dynamically allocating (and deallocating) servers in response to the current load conditions. In this paper we…

This paper investigates the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimise call routing in call centres to minimise client waiting time and staff idle time. Two methods are compared: a model-based approach using Value Iteration (VI)…

We present a dynamic programming-based solution to a stochastic optimal control problem up to a hitting time for a discrete-time Markov control process. Firstly, we determine an optimal control policy to steer the process toward a compact…

Recent studies indicate that in many situations service times are affected by the experienced queueing delay of the particular customer. This effect has been detected in different areas, such as health care, call centers and…

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…

This paper proposes a method to compute lower performance bounds for discrete-time infinite-horizon min-max control problems with input constraints and bounded disturbances. Such bounds can be used as a performance metric for control…

The possibility of flexibly assigning spectrum resources with channels of different sizes greatly improves the spectral efficiency of optical networks, but can also lead to unwanted spectrum fragmentation.We study this problem in a scenario…

We investigate the optimal pricing strategy in a service-providing framework, where customers can leave the system prior to service completion. In this setting, a price is quoted to an incoming customer based on the current number of…

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…

This paper studies a sequential decision-making problem in a two-stage queueing system modeled after operations in CVS MinuteClinics, where nurse practitioners (NPs) oversee patient care throughout the entire visit. All services are…

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…