Title
Balancing staffing and switching costs in a service center with flexible servers
Abstract
In this paper, we study the problem of balancing staffing and switching costs in a service center with multiple types of customers and time-dependent service demand. We assume that servers are flexible and can be switched from serving one type of customers to another. The objective is to minimize the total staffing and switching costs subject to service level constraints. Column generation heuristics are developed based on a formulation from the perspective of servers. Computational experiments show that the heuristics perform well. Furthermore, an extension of the model is presented for the situation where there is a penalty if some of the service requests are not covered (satisfied).
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1016/j.ejor.2006.01.008
European Journal of Operational Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Workforce planning,Column generation
Column generation,Service level,Staffing,Server,Heuristics,Workforce planning,Service demand,Service time,Mathematics,Operations management
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
177
2
0377-2217
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.71
6
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rajan Batta184989.39
O. Berman21604231.36
Qian Wang3110.71