Indr 481 Information Systems

Call Center Workforce Planning Project Description Part 2: Mat ematical Modeling
In any call center, the main goal of workforce planning is having the right number of skilled people and the resources in place at the right times to handle an accurately forecasted workload of incoming calls, at the aimed service levels and quality. When the objective is to minimize the operating costs, it is essential that the total operating costs are calculated. In most call centers, once the staffing requirements are adequately calculated, the personnel costs are fixed. owever, there are other cost components that depend on the actual assignment of individual agents to specific shifts over a planning horizon. !ne such component is the transportation of the call center agents. In large metropolitans, such as Istanbul, call centers typically provide shuttling services for their employees. In these cases where distances are large and fuel costs are high, shuttle running cost becomes a considerable part of the total operational cost. If the scheduling of the agents is done without transportation in mind, inefficiencies occur especially for the night shifts" most of the shuttles can run nearly empty if the agents on the night shifts are located on distinct regions of the city. #ven during the morning shifts, shuttles should be arranged in order to minimize their total traveling times by grouping agents residing in close regions into the same shuttle. $s current software packages used by call centers do not handle the transportation of the agents, valuable managerial time is wasted for organizing the daily shuttle activity. %urthermore, the consideration of shuttle costs in an optimization model that minimizes total operating costs will provide possible financial benefits to the call centers. $s part of your project on developing a decision support tool for workforce planning at call centers, you need to develop a mixed&integer program that solves the integrated agent& shift assignment and transportation problem. Model C aracteristics: 'he scheduling activity in a call center begins with the determination of the adequate workforce size. 'he widespread performance criterion is the answering of ()* of the incoming calls within +) seconds, but the requirements may change with different contracts. With the help of stochastic models, the data taken in the form of incoming call volumes are converted to minimum number of agents required in order to satisfy the performance criterion. 'he incoming call volumes are estimated using forecasting techniques and then are converted to half&hourly minimum workforce requirement for the entire planning horizon which is usually a month. In a modeling perspective, meeting the minimum workforce levels constitutes the first set of constraints in the mathematical program. 'he number of agents assigned at a specific half&hour interval should be greater than or equal to the requirement. 'his brings the definition of the shifts into focus. $ny particular agent will be assigned a time interval in a day when he ,or she- will be present in the call center. !nce the set of shifts are determined, the model takes them as input and must make sure that an agent .

can only be assigned to at most one shift in a day. /ormally the model has to also decide on when the shifts should start and how long they should be but here for simplicity you can assume that the shifts are already fixed. 0se the shifts given to you in the input data. owever, in the solution, some shifts can be useless, meaning that there are no agents assigned to those shifts. 'he agents are identical and there is no skill system. 'his indicates that all incoming calls demand identical services. 0se the total requirement for each two&hour interval, given in your data set. ere we disregard work regulations and constraints related to the work hours of each agent such as each agent having at least a fixed number of hours between the successive shifts she1he is assigned to. 'here exist only a limited number of desks with equipment in a call center. In this respect, there should not be more agents assigned than the available capacity at any time. 'he objective of the model is to minimize total personnel costs and the transportation costs. 2ersonnel cost is incurred when an agent is assigned to a specific shift. $s some shifts are less favorable than others, the wages paid to the agents assigned to these shifts are typically higher. 'he transportation activities are as follows. 'he metropolitan area of the city is divided into several mutually exclusive but collectively exhaustive 3shuttle zones4, to which shuttles can be assigned at fixed costs. ere we assume that there exists only one type of shuttle with a given seating capacity and that the required number of shuttles can be provided at a time. 'he cost of transportation depends on the number of shuttles used as the transportation firms do not charge call centers per person but per shuttle run. 'his requires the modeler to relate the number of agents assigned from a shuttle zone at a time point of interest to the number of shuttles required. ,5learly, each agent is registered to exactly one shuttle zone.- While relating the number of agents assigned to a shift to the number of shuttles assigned to a shuttle zone, two transportation activities must be scheduled" %irst, the agents must be transported from their residences to the call center before the start of the corresponding shift and then secondly they must be transported back from the call center to their residences. /umber of shuttles needed should be integer and there may be some other variables are required to be integer or binary. 2lease pay attention to those conditions while modelling. 6chedule is made for one day period. 'his can be based on the assumption that the requirements for the day are known before the schedule is generated.

Project Report 2: (due Dec. 12, 2013 Thursday, beginning of c ass!

In this report you should construct a mixed integer programming model for the described workforce planning problem. %irst define the input parameters and the decision variables of your model, while keeping in mind the data available to you. 7ou should explicitly write the objective function and the constraints of the model together with a brief explanation of each in your report. 2lease see the next page that provides hints and assumptions for building the model. 6ubmit your report to the course share folder and provide a printout of your report to your '$s. +

Hints on model construction: Parameters: The number of agents required to work in each period will be your requirement parameters. You will need an input parameter to indicate in which region each agent lives in order to calculate transportation costs:

. ar = ) . ij = ) . xai = )

if agent a resides in shuttle region r otherwise if period i is a work period for shift j otherwise if agent a is assigned to work in shift i otherwise

You also need to indicate which time periods are included in each shift.

Decision Variables: You need to assign agents to shifts using binary variables

You would also need integer variables for the number of shuttles.
u ri = number of incoming shuttles from region r at time period i

vri = number of outgoing shuttles from region r at time period i Mathematical Model: Minimize total cost of assigning agents to shifts and the transportation cost. You need constraints to ensure The number of agents assigned to a shift encompassing period i is more than the minimum requirement for period i. At any time period the number of assigned agents is less than the capacity of the call center. All agents does not have to be assigned. elate the variable x to variables u and v by scheduling a shuttle for all agents who start working at a shift at i from a region r by forcing the number of shuttles scheduled to be at least the number of agents divided by the capacity of the shuttle.