Scaling and Modeling of Call Center Arrivals
Dec 10, 2014·
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0 min read
Xiaowei Zhang
L. Jeff Hong
Jiheng Zhang
Abstract
The Poisson process has been an integral part of many models for the arrival process to a telephone call centers. However, several publications in recent years suggest the presence of a significant ‘‘overdisperson’’ relative to the Poisson process in real-life call center arrival data. In this paper, we study the overdispersion in the context of ‘‘heavy traffic’’ and identify a critical factor that characterizes the stochastic variability of the arrivals to their averages. We refer to such a factor as the scaling parameter and it potentially has a profound impact on the design of staffing rules. We propose an new model to capture the scaling parameter in this paper.
Type
Publication
Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference, 476–485
Authors
I am an Associate Professor at HKUST, jointly appointed in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics and the Department of Economics, and the Academic Director of the MSc in FinTech program. I serve as an Associate Editor for several leading journals in the field, including Management Science, Operations Research, Navel Research Logistics, and Queueing Systems.
Authors
Professor in Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
Authors
Head and Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics Professor, and Professor in Department of Mathematics, HKUST.