Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating sociotechnical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments traditional operational models are of great value--and at the same time fundamentally limited--in their ability to characterize system performance.We review the state of research on telephone call centers. We begin with a tutorial on how call centers function and proceed to survey academic research devoted to the management of their operations. We then outline important problems that have not been addressed and identify promising directions for future research.

/pdf/commissioned-paper-telephone-call-centers-tutorial-review-3kz951v5q4.pdf

Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects

https://web.stanford.edu/class/msande312/restricted/klos04facility.pdf

Facility location models for distribution system design

https://faculty.biu.ac.il/~shnaidh/zooloo/trnsprt2/Location-routing-%20Issues,%20models%20and%20methods.pdf

Location-routing: Issues, models and methods

http://yoksis.bilkent.edu.tr/doi_getpdf/articles/10.1016-j.ejor.2007.06.008.pdf

Network hub location problems : The state of the art

Call centers are an increasingly important part of today's business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries. Call centers have been a fertile area for operations management researchers in several domains, including forecasting, capacity planning, queueing, and personnel scheduling. In addition, as telecommunications and information technology have advanced over the past several years, the operational challenges faced by call center managers have become more complicated. Issues associated with human resources management, sales, and marketing have also become increasingly relevant to call center operations and associated academic research.

In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities.

/pdf/the-modern-call-center-a-multi-disciplinary-perspective-on-2kcrgkbqth.pdf

The Modern Call Center: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

On “a quadratic integer program for the location of interacting hub facilities”

Lagrangian relaxation based approaches to capacitated hub-and-spoke network design problem

This paper presents a new integer programming model for optimal shift scheduling with multiple rest and lunch breaks, and break windows. A set-covering approach for this problem was originally developed by Dantzig 1954. Since then, a number of set-covering-based formulations have been proposed in the literature. These formulations require an integer variable for every shift type, shift start time, and rest/lunch break placement combination. Unfortunately, the number of integer variables required is rather large, making them impractical to solve for an optimal solution in most applications. We present a new approach in which a set of break variables is introduced for every shift-break type combination to determine the break placements. This approach leads to a significantly improved integer programming model requiring substantially smaller number of variables and computer memory. We tested the proposed approach with 40 test problems involving between 1,728 and 8,640 shift variations, and five demand patterns. Our results showed that the proposed formulation is very useful in solving large shift scheduling problems optimally.

Turgut Aykin

Papers

On “a quadratic integer program for the location of interacting hub facilities”

Lagrangian relaxation based approaches to capacitated hub-and-spoke network design problem

Optimal Shift Scheduling with Multiple Break Windows

The hub location and routing problem