Overflow Networks: Approximations and Implications to Call Center Outsourcing
成果类型：
Article
署名作者：
Gurvich, Itai; Perry, Ohad
署名单位：
Northwestern University; Northwestern University
刊物名称：
OPERATIONS RESEARCH
ISSN/ISSBN：
0030-364X
DOI：
10.1287/opre.1120.1070
发表日期：
2012
页码：
996-1009
关键词：
摘要：
Motivated by call center cosourcing problems, we consider a service network operated under an overflow mechanism. Calls are first routed to an in-house (or dedicated) service station that has a finite waiting room. If the waiting room is full, the call is overflowed to an outside provider (an overflow station) that might also be serving overflows from other stations. We establish approximations for overflow networks with many servers under a resource-pooling assumption that stipulates, in our context, that the fraction of overflowed calls is nonnegligible. Our two main results are (i) an approximation for the overflow processes via limit theorems and (ii) asymptotic independence between each of the in-house stations and the overflow station. In particular, we show that, as the system becomes large, the dependency between each in-house station and the overflow station becomes negligible. Independence between stations in overflow networks is assumed in the literature on call centers, and we provide a rigorous support for those useful heuristics.