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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Faculty Candidate: Itay Gurvich
Presentation Title: Service-level differentiation in large-scale service systems
Abstract: Motivated by telephone call centers, we study the problem of service-level differentiation in largescale service systems with multiple customer classes and multiple agent pools. Call Centers usually specify their operational objectives through the x-y service-level (SL) constraint, which stipulates that x% of the calls should be answered within y seconds. Typically, service-level differentiation is imposed through different SL objectives for different customer classes. In order to achieve these constraints a Call-Center needs to determine the types of agents that will be used (Design), the number of agents of each type (Staffing) and the real-time control to be used (Routing). We propose a solution based on a family of routing controls called Fixed-Queue-Ratio (FQR) rules. In many settings, FQR allows us to solve the combined Design-Staffing-and-Routing problem in a nearly optimal way. Our analysis also establishes a diminishing-returns property of flexibility by showing that,under FQR, very moderate cross-training is sufficient to make the call center work as efficiently as a single-pool system. This is joint work with Ward Whitt.
Education
2004-2008 Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, New York.
PhD in Decisions, Risk and Operations
Dissertation: "Staffing and Control of Many-Server Service Systems". Principal Adviser: Ward Whitt; Co-Advisers: Mor Armony, Costis Maglaras and Assaf Zeevi.
2002-2004 Technion
