Modeling daily arrivals to a telephone call center
Modeling daily arrivals to a telephone call center
We develop stochastic models of time-dependent arrivals, with focus on the application to call centers. Our models reproduce three essential features of call center arrivals observed in recent empirical studies: a variance larger than the mean for the number of arrivals in any given time interval, a time-varying arrival intensity over the course of a day, and nonzero correlation between the arrival counts in different periods within the same day. For each of the new models, we characterize the joint distribution of the vector of arrival counts, with particular focus on characterizing how the new models are more flexible than standard or previously proposed models. We report empirical results from a study on arrival data from a real-life call center, including the essential features of the arrival process, the goodness of fit of the estimated models, and the sensitivity of various simulated performance measures of the call center to the choice of arrival process model.
call center, arrival process, multivariate distribution, doubly stochastic poisson process, input modeling, correlation
896-908
Avramidis, A.N.
d6c4b6b6-c0cf-4ed1-bbe1-a539937e4001
Deslauriers, A.
5d672e70-0546-492f-9167-880e8ed6e4de
L'Ecuyer, P.
6a72df10-5abf-4ff2-bb06-d9f9047f328e
July 2004
Avramidis, A.N.
d6c4b6b6-c0cf-4ed1-bbe1-a539937e4001
Deslauriers, A.
5d672e70-0546-492f-9167-880e8ed6e4de
L'Ecuyer, P.
6a72df10-5abf-4ff2-bb06-d9f9047f328e
Avramidis, A.N., Deslauriers, A. and L'Ecuyer, P.
(2004)
Modeling daily arrivals to a telephone call center.
Management Science, 50 (7), .
(doi:10.1287/mnsc.1040.0236).
Abstract
We develop stochastic models of time-dependent arrivals, with focus on the application to call centers. Our models reproduce three essential features of call center arrivals observed in recent empirical studies: a variance larger than the mean for the number of arrivals in any given time interval, a time-varying arrival intensity over the course of a day, and nonzero correlation between the arrival counts in different periods within the same day. For each of the new models, we characterize the joint distribution of the vector of arrival counts, with particular focus on characterizing how the new models are more flexible than standard or previously proposed models. We report empirical results from a study on arrival data from a real-life call center, including the essential features of the arrival process, the goodness of fit of the estimated models, and the sensitivity of various simulated performance measures of the call center to the choice of arrival process model.
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Published date: July 2004
Keywords:
call center, arrival process, multivariate distribution, doubly stochastic poisson process, input modeling, correlation
Organisations:
Operational Research
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 48876
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/48876
ISSN: 0025-1909
PURE UUID: 497854c1-14da-42b0-9eb6-79b37303c506
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Date deposited: 17 Oct 2007
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 03:56
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Author:
A. Deslauriers
Author:
P. L'Ecuyer
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