Abstract
We can observe that the demand of a call center fluctuates greatly. However, it is uneconomical to provide a 100% service level for time-varying demands like a call center because of the cost consideration and the government regulations and company policy. In this study, we investigate the agent shift scheduling problem for a 24-hours call center. We assume that the efficiency is the same for each employee and every employee can be qualified for multiple skills. Given the shift types, the demand of each time period and previous agent shift schedules, we try to find a better method to solve the agent shift scheduling problem in call center. The method must consider the government regulations, company policy and advanced vacation arrangements by agents. We use two modules to solve the call center agent scheduling problem. The first module use constraint programming to model the agent shift assignment problem. By using the concepts of constraint programming such as consistency checking techniques, searching algorithm and constraint propagation, we are able to find all feasible assignments. In the second module, we use linear program formulation to allocate agents to various skill demands for each time period. The objective of the linear program is to minimize the shortage cost of skill demands. To validate the proposed method, we will use ILOG Solver, a constraint programming software, to perform the calculation of the first module; also, we will use ILOG CPLEX to perform the computation of the linear program problem. After validating the modules, we are able to find the optimal schedule for small size problem. But, when the problem scale is getting larger, the number of feasible solutions provided by constraint programming is also getting too huge and it very difficult to solve the whole problem with a reasonable computation. Hence, it may be a good direction for further research.