Study On The Routing Strategies And Workforce Scheduling Of Heterogeneous Agents In Call Centers

The call center has become increasingly close to people’s daily life.Social service departments,governments,and enterprises use call centers to communicate with customers.Call center managers hope to achieve customer satisfaction while minimizing operating costs,70% of which are labor costs,it can be greatly reduced by calculating better workforce requirements and optimizing scheduling management.Within a group of agents,there is a significant difference in the service time of staff,called agent heterogeneity,with a nearly twofold difference between experienced agents and unskilled agents.In this case,routing strategy and scheduling can jointly affect call center service performance.Therefore,this paper no longer assumes that there is no difference in the service times of agents,and jointly investigates the routing strategy and scheduling issues,with the following main research efforts.Firstly,after processing actual call center operation data,it is shown that there is a significant difference in agent service times,which is contrary to the standard queuing model assuming agents are homogeneous.Therefore,this paper uses the discrete event simulation modeling approach to build a call center simulation model to solve the related problems.Under the case of agent heterogeneity,the introduction of routing strategies affects the call center performance variation.By changing the routing on the basis of the above simulation model,the performance of routing strategies is compared by numerical experimental analysis.Eventually,the call center simulation model with heterogeneous agents will be configured with stable and better routing strategy,laying the foundation for calculating the heterogeneous workforce demand and optimizing the scheduling problem.Secondly,this paper studies the problem of calculating workforce demand under the heterogeneity of agent service time.An integer programming model for calculating heterogeneous labor demand under each period is first established,using an optimization algorithm combined with a discrete simulation model to solve it,programmed with MATLAB software,and further construct an ensemble coverage model to calculate the heterogeneous manpower demand for each shift.Then,running the call center discrete simulation model to reach steady state to output the minimum service rate under each period to prepare for the heterogeneous agent scheduling problem.Finally,this paper studies the call center scheduling optimization problem with agent heterogeneity.An integer programming model of heterogeneous agent rostering problem is established and solved by an artificial bee algorithm combined with a discrete simulation model.The artificial bee algorithm is mainly used to generate and adjust the shift schedule,and the discrete simulation model outputs the service level of the schedule for verification.The two modules are repeatedly ran until satisfying the end conditions to obtain a scheduling scheme with better labor cost and the service level of each time period is satisfied and the call service coverage can be completed.