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Creating Work Breaks from Available Idleness

Authors:

Ward WhittAuthors Info & Claims

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Volume 20, Issue 4

Pages 721 - 736

https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0682

Published: 01 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We develop new rules for assigning available service representatives to customers in customer contact centers and other large-scale service systems in order to create effective work breaks for the service representatives from naturally available idleness. These are unplanned breaks occurring randomly over time. We consider both announced breaks as well as unannounced breaks. Our goal is to make the mean and variance of the interval between successive breaks suitably small. Given a target break duration, we propose assigning idle servers based on the elapsed time since their last break. We show that our proposed server-assignment rules are optimal for the many-server heavy-traffic MSHT fluid model. Extensive simulation experiments support the proposed server-assignment rules in practical cases and confirm the MSHT approximation formulas when the number of servers is very large.

The online appendix is available at <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" href="https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0682">https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0682</ext-link>.

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Cited By

Pendem PGreen PStaats B(2022)The Microstructure of WorkManufacturing & Service Operations Management10.1287/msom.2021.105324:4(2202-2220)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/msom.2021.1053
Zhan DWard A(2019)Staffing, Routing, and Payment to Trade off Speed and Quality in Large Service SystemsOperations Research10.1287/opre.2018.183867:6(1738-1751)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/opre.2018.1838

Creating Work Breaks from Available Idleness
1. Applied computing

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cover image Manufacturing & Service Operations Management

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Volume 20, Issue 4

October 2018

200 pages

ISSN:1526-5498

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Publisher

INFORMS

Linthicum, MD, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 October 2018

Accepted: 04 October 2017

Received: 09 September 2016

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Cited By

Pendem PGreen PStaats B(2022)The Microstructure of WorkManufacturing & Service Operations Management10.1287/msom.2021.105324:4(2202-2220)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/msom.2021.1053
Zhan DWard A(2019)Staffing, Routing, and Payment to Trade off Speed and Quality in Large Service SystemsOperations Research10.1287/opre.2018.183867:6(1738-1751)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/opre.2018.1838

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