Fluid Approximations for a Priority Call Center with Time-varying Arrivals
نویسندگان
چکیده
We model a call center as a preemptive-resume priority queue with time-varying arrival rates and two priority classes of customers. The low priority customers have a dynamic priority where they become high priority if their waitingtime exceeds a given service-level time. The performance of the call center is measured by the mean number in system for the two customer classes. A fluid approximation is proposed to estimate the mean number in system for each class. The quality of the approximation is tested by comparing it with a stochastic simulation model of the system. Finally, using the fluid approximations, we discuss how to compute the mean number in system for each class and estimate the overall staffing level, or number of agents.
منابع مشابه
Fluid Approximation of a Priority Call Center With Time-Varying Arrivals
In this paper, we model a call center as a preemptive-resume priority queue with time-varying arrival rates and two priority classes of customers. The low priority customers have a dynamic priority where they become high priority if their waiting-time in queue exceeds a given service-level time. The performance of the call center is measured by the mean number in system for the two customer cla...
متن کاملModeling and Forecasting Call Center Arrivals: a Literature Survey
The effective management of call centers is a challenging task mainly because managers are consistently facing considerable uncertainty. Among important sources of uncertainty are call arrival rates which are typically time-varying, stochastic, dependent across time periods and across call types, and often affected by external events. Accurately modeling and forecasting future call arrival volu...
متن کاملModeling Daily Arrivals to a Telephone Call Center
W develop stochastic models of time-dependent arrivals, with focus on the application to call centers. Our models reproduce three essential features of call center arrivals observed in recent empirical studies: a variance larger than the mean for the number of arrivals in any given time interval, a time-varying arrival intensity over the course of a day, and nonzero correlation between the arri...
متن کاملManaging uncertainty in call centers using Poisson mixtures
We model a call center as a queueing model with Poisson arrivals having an unknown varying arrival rate. We show how to compute prediction intervals for the arrival rate, and use the Erlang formula for the waiting time to compute the consequences for the occupancy level of the call center. We compare it to the current practice of using a point estimate of the arrival rate (assumed constant) as ...
متن کاملApproximations for the M/GI/N+GI type call center
In this study, we propose approximations to compute the steady-state performance measures of the M/GI/N + GI queue receiving Poisson arrivals with N identical servers, and general service and abandonment-time distributions. The approximations are based on scaling a single server M/GI/1 + GI queue for which we suggest a practical way to compute the waiting time distributions and their moments. T...
متن کامل