COMPARISON OF METAHEURISTICS FOR WORKFORCE DISTRIBUTION IN MULTI-SKILL CALL CENTRES

David Millán-Ruiz, J. Ignacio Hidalgo, Josefa Díaz

2010

Abstract

Call centre technology requires the assignment of a large volume of incoming calls to agents with the required skills to process them. In order to determine the right assignment among incoming calls and agents for a real production environment, a comparative study of meta-heuristics has been carried out. The aim of this study is to implement and empirically compare various representative meta-heuristics, which represent distinct search strategies to reach accurate, feasible solutions, for two different instances of the workforce distribution problem. This study points out how memetic algorithms can outperform other acknowledged meta-heuristics for two different problem instances from a real multi-skill call centre from one of the world's largest telecommunications companies.

References

  1. Chakraborty, B. and Chaudhuri, P., 2003. On The Use of Genetic Algorithm with Elitism in Robust and Nonparametric Multivariate Analysis, Austrian Journal of statistics.
  2. Chauvet, F.; Proth, J. M.; Soumare, A., 2000. The simple and multiple job assignment problems, International Journal of Production Research, Volume 38, Issue 14, pages 3165-3179, 2000.
  3. Garnett O. and Mandelbaum, A., 2000. An Introduction to Skills-Based Routing and its Operational Complexities, Teaching Note.
  4. Kirkpatrick, S., Gelatt, C. D., and Vecchi, M. P., 1983. Optimization by Simulated Annealing, Science, Volume 220, Number 4598, pp. 671680.
  5. Koole, G., 2006. Call Center Mathematics: A scientific method for understanding and improving contact centers, http://www.cs.vu.nl/koole/ccmath/book.pdf, 2006.
  6. Millán-Ruiz, D. and Hidalgo, I., 2010. A Memetic Algorithm for Workforce Distribution in Dynamic Multi-Skil Call Centres, EVOCOP 2010, pp. 178-189.
  7. Mladenovic, N. and Hansen, P., 1997. Variable Neighborhood Search. Computers & Operations Research 24, pp. 1097-1100.
  8. Prügel-Bennett, A., 2000. Finite Population Effects for Ranking and Tournament Selection. Complex Systems, 12 (2), pp. 183-205.
  9. Stützle, T., 2006. Iterated local search for the quadratic assignment problem. European Journal of Operational Research, Volume 174, Issue 3, pp. 1519-1539.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Millán-Ruiz D., Hidalgo J. and Díaz J. (2010). COMPARISON OF METAHEURISTICS FOR WORKFORCE DISTRIBUTION IN MULTI-SKILL CALL CENTRES . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation - Volume 1: ICEC, (IJCCI 2010) ISBN 978-989-8425-31-7, pages 352-357. DOI: 10.5220/0003083503520357


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icec10,
author={David Millán-Ruiz and J. Ignacio Hidalgo and Josefa Díaz},
title={COMPARISON OF METAHEURISTICS FOR WORKFORCE DISTRIBUTION IN MULTI-SKILL CALL CENTRES},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation - Volume 1: ICEC, (IJCCI 2010)},
year={2010},
pages={352-357},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003083503520357},
isbn={978-989-8425-31-7},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation - Volume 1: ICEC, (IJCCI 2010)
TI - COMPARISON OF METAHEURISTICS FOR WORKFORCE DISTRIBUTION IN MULTI-SKILL CALL CENTRES
SN - 978-989-8425-31-7
AU - Millán-Ruiz D.
AU - Hidalgo J.
AU - Díaz J.
PY - 2010
SP - 352
EP - 357
DO - 10.5220/0003083503520357