Agent scheduling in a multiskill call center

This is a summary of the author’s PhD thesis, supervised by Pierre L’Ecuyer and Roberto Musmanno and defended on 21 February 2008 at the Università della Calabria. The thesis is written in English and is available from the author upon request. This work deals with the comparison of simulation-based algorithms for solving the agents scheduling problem in a multiskill call center minimizing their costs under service levels constraints. A solution approach, combining simulation, with integer or linear programming, and cut generation, is proposed. Considering realistic problems, it performs better than the two-step approach proposed in the literature. It is also shown that a randomized search, extending the one defined for the single-period staffing problem in Avramidis et al. [IIE Trans (in press), 2008], yields highly suboptimal solutions. Finally, an extension of the cutting plane method to directly control the probability on the customers abandonments is designed.