Copyright © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Production, Manufacturing and Logistics
Balancing staffing and switching costs in a service center with flexible servers
Received 12 October 2004;
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Abstract
In this paper, we study the problem of balancing staffing and switching costs in a service center with multiple types of customers and time-dependent service demand. We assume that servers are flexible and can be switched from serving one type of customers to another. The objective is to minimize the total staffing and switching costs subject to service level constraints. Column generation heuristics are developed based on a formulation from the perspective of servers. Computational experiments show that the heuristics perform well. Furthermore, an extension of the model is presented for the situation where there is a penalty if some of the service requests are not covered (satisfied).
Keywords: Workforce planning; Column generation
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Problem description and notation
- 3. Single server type with zero switching time
- 4. Formulation and column generation heuristics
- 4.1. Assignment path
- 4.2. Integer programming formulation
- 4.3. Lower bound through LP relaxation
- 4.3.1. Master problem
- 4.3.2. Pricing problem
- 4.3.3. Initial solution
- 4.3.4. Iteration strategy
- 4.4. Upper bound
- 4.4.1. Heuristic 1 (H1)
- 4.4.2. Heuristic 2 (H2)
- 5. Computational results
- 6. Extension to maximize service coverage
- 7. Summary and future work
- Acknowledgements
- Appendix A. Appendix
- A.1. Formulation (P): from the perspective of groups
- A.2. Formulation (PC): from the perspective of groups with penalty
- References







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