e consider the issue of new project staffing in an outsourced call center required to meet a monthly Service Level Agreement (SLA). We present empirical analysis generated during a field study with a provider of outsourced call center services to illustrate the unique issues related to staffing a new project. Our work shows that during the start-up phase of a project agents experience significa...

Previous work shows request tracing systems help understand and debug the performance problems of multi-tier services. However, for large-scale data centers, more than hundreds of thousands of service instances provide online service at the same time. Previous work such as white-box or black box tracing systems will produce large amount of log data, which would be correlated into large quantiti...

To reduce the negative environmental implications (e.g., CO2 emission and global warming) caused by the rapidly increasing energy consumption, many Internet service operators have started taking various initiatives to operate their cloud-scale data centers with renewable energy. Unfortunately, due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels, cur...

virtual appliances X. Jin R. Willenborg Y. Zhao C. Sun L. He Z. Chen Y. Chen Q. Wang Today, data centers are being built with more entities on a larger scale in order to satisfy the rapid growth of services and the demand for efficient service delivery and management. These data centers are facing scalability, manageability, and consumability challenges that require breakthrough technology for ...

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Enrique Nieves Jr is the Acting Director of the Division of Integrated Surveillance Systems and Services (DISSS), National Center for Public for Health Informatics (NCPHI), Coordinating Center for Health information and Service (CCHIS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, USA. Jay Jones is a BearingPoint Consultant to the CDC/NCPHI Division of Alliance ...

In this paper the problem of optimal location of service centers is considered by minimax criterion. It is supposed that the information received from GIS is presented like graph with fuzzy intervals. The notion of fuzzy set of interval bases is considered. It is shown that the problem of service centers location is reduced to a problem of finding fuzzy set of interval bases. Method of finding ...

Call centers are complex contact centers to handle large volume of inbound, outbound or both types of calls depending on the business purpose. Call centers assume the role of the primary contact medium for many companies from a wide range of industries with their customers or clients. Despite of being seen traditionally as adding cost to the companies’ bottom lines, call centers are now viewed ...

AIM To determine the sources of stress, its intensity, frequency, and psychophysical and behavioral reactions in physicians working in emergency medical service and those working in health centers. METHODS To a convenience sample of primary care physicians employed in emergency medical service (n = 79) and health centers (n = 81), we administered the list of demographic questions, Scale of So...

Collecting, sorting, transporting, and delivering the nation’s mail to every household and business across the country—from Alaska to Puerto Rico—is an enormous task. To accomplish this task, the Postal Service uses a physical infrastructure that includes more than 38,000 post offices and contract units, 282 automated processing centers, 63 airport mail facilities, 21 bulk mail centers and a nu...