Companies may choose to outsource parts, but not all, of their call-center operations. In some cases, they classify customers as high or low value, serving the former with their in-house operations and routing the latter to an outsourcer. Typically, they impose service-level constraints on the...

We study the employee staffing problem in a service organization that uses employee service capacity to meet random, nonstationary service requirements. The employees experience learning and turnover on the job, and we develop a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model which explicitly represents the...

We study an M/MMPP/1 queuing system, where the arrival process is Poisson and service requirements are Markov modulated. When the Markov Chain modulating service times has two states, we show that the distribution of the number-in-system is a superposition of two matrix-geometric series and...

We study the employee staffing problem in a service organization that uses employee service capacities to meet random, non-stationary service requirements. The employees experience learning and turnover on the job, and we develop a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model that explicitly represents...