Hierarchical Multi-skill Resource Assignment in the Telecommunications Industry

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Barz, Christiane; Kolisch, Rainer
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Technical University of Munich
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.12053
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 489-503
• 关键词: Markov decision process; approximate linear programming; multi-skilled resources; admission control; Queueing

摘要

We formulate a discrete time Markov decision process for a resource assignment problem for multi-skilled resources with a hierarchical skill structure to minimize the average penalty and waiting costs for jobs with different waiting costs and uncertain service times. In contrast to most queueing models, our application leads to service times that are known before the job is actually served but only after it is accepted and assigned to a server. We formulate the corresponding Markov decision process, which is intractable for problems of realistic size due to the curse of dimensionality. Using an affine approximation of the bias function, we develop a simple linear program that yields a lower bound for the minimum average costs. We suggest how the solution of the linear program can be used in a simple heuristic and illustrate its performance in numerical examples and a case study.