Staffing call centers under arrival-rate uncertainty with Bayesian updates

Abstract We consider the problem of staffing service centers with quality-of-service constraints. We focus on the case where the arrival rates are uncertain. We introduce formulations that handle staffing decisions made over two decision periods, minimizing the staffing costs over the stages while satisfying a service quality constraint on the second stage operation. A Bayesian update is used to obtain the second-stage arrival-rate distribution based on the first stage prior arrival-rate distribution and the observations in the first stage.

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