Modelling and simulation of a telephone call center

• Published in: Proceedings of the 2003 Winter Simulation Conference, 2003 Vol. 2; pp. 1805 - 1812 vol.2
• Main Authors: Pichitlamken, Deslauriers, L'Ecuyer, Avramidis
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2003
• Subjects: Analytical models; Computational modeling; Marketing and sales; Performance analysis; Productivity; Queueing analysis; Stochastic processes; System performance; Telephony; Traffic control
• ISBN: 9780780381315; 0780381319
• DOI: 10.1109/WSC.2003.1261636

We consider a system with two types of traffic and two types of agents. Outbound calls are served only by blend agents, whereas inbound calls can be served by either inbound-only or blend agents. Our objective is to allocate a number of agents such that some service requirement is satisfied. We have taken two approaches in analyzing this staffing problem: we developed a simulation model of the call center, which allows us to do a what-if analysis, as well as continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) queueing models, which provide approximations of system performance measures. We describe the simulation model here.