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We consider a call center with two classes of impatient customers: premium and regular classes. Modeling our call center as a multiclass GI/GI/s+M queue, we focus on developing scheduling policies that satisfy a target ratio constraint on the abandonment probabilities of premium customers to...

We study a simple method for staffing in multiskill call centers. The method has short computation times and determines nearly optimal staffing levels. It is in both views competitive to other methods from the literature. Because of the fast and accurate performance of the method, many different...

Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating sociotechnical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments...

This paper introduces a new method for shift scheduling in multiskill call centers. The method consists of two steps. First, staffing levels are determined, and next, in the second step, the outcomes are used as input for the scheduling problem. The scheduling problem relies on a linear...

We give a closed-form expression for the long-run average cost and the bias vector in a two-class exponential preemptive resume priority queue with holding and switching costs. The bias vector is the sum of a quadratic function of the number of customers in each priority class and an exponential...

We consider Markov Decision Processes under light traffic conditions. We develop an algorithm to obtain asymptotically optimal policies for both the total discounted and the average cost criterion. This gives a general framework for several light traffic results in the literature. We illustrate...

In this paper we apply a new framework for the study of monotonicity in queueing systems to stochastic scheduling models. This allows us a unified treatment of many different models, among which are multiple and single server models (with and without feedback), discrete and continuous time...

We give a closed-form expression for the long-run average cost and the bias vector in a two-class exponential preemptive resume priority queue with holding and switching costs. The bias vector is the sum of a quadratic function of the number of customers in each priority class and an exponential...

A highly accurate demand forecast is fundamental to the success of every revenue management model. As is often required in both practice and theory, we aim to forecast the accumulated booking curve, as well as the number of reservations expected for each day in the booking horizon. To reduce the...