Online storage service providers such as Amazon S3 grant a way for companies, particularly startups, to avoid spending resources on maintaining their own in-house storage infrastructure and thereby allowing them to focus on their core business activities. These providers however follow a fixed,...

The emergence of globally distributed call-center networks, such as Dell International Support Service, has fundamentally increased the challenges to the management. This new trend of networking faces the risk of extensive demand fluctuation both over locations and over time. Existing literature...