This paper presents a profit-oriented shift scheduling approach for inbound contact centers. The focus is on systems in which multiple agent classes with different qualifications serve multiple customer classes with different needs. We assume that customers are impatient, abandon if they have to...

This paper presents a linear programming approach to analyze and optimize flow lines with limited buffer capacities and stochastic processing times. The basic idea is to solve a huge but simple linear program that models an entire simulation run of a multi-stage production process in discrete...

Long-term throughput, as a key performance indicator of a stochastic flow line, is affected by numerous parameters describing the features of the flow line, such as processing time and buffer size. Fast and accurate evaluation methods for a given set of values for those parameters are a...