A Call Center Model with Upgrades
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Date: 03-11-2008
Start Time:
1:00pm
End Time: 2:00pm
Speaker: Mark Lewis, Cornell University
Location: Mudd 303
ABSTRACT
In this talk we consider a two station call center with upgrades. Each station has dedicated (Poisson) arrival streams. Station 1 is equipped with cross trained workers that can serve customers from either station while Station 2 has only dedicated servers. This is the classic "N-network" with the following twist: customers that begin at Station 1 are upgraded to Station 2 after an exponential amount of time. With this innovation we show that different stability conditions can be derived depending on the order of the service rates. We then show that optimal allocation policies follow the c-mu rule, but only under one direction of the index AND a similar assumption on the service rates. Finally, via a short numerical study we show that upgrades are useful in both decreasing average costs and average waiting times...sometimes even of both customer classes.
This is joint with Douglas Down from McMaster University.
BIO
Professor Lewis received his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998. He then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Commerce and 6 years on the faculty of the Industrial and Operations Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. He joined the faculty of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University in 2005. His research interests include sequential decision-making under uncertainty as it applies to queueing and inventory control. He is a recipient of NSF Career award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and was recently a participant in the National Academy of Engineering's Frontiers of Engineering.