Staffing And Control Of Many-Server Service Systems

This paper considers large-scale service systems with multiple customer classes and agent types. Customers are classified according to their processing requirements, service-level guarantees, or both. The customers are served by agents of different types. These are classified according to the subset of customer classes that they can serve. The author considers the problem of optimally choosing the capacity allocations of the different agent types and the real-time routing of costumers to agents. As a first step towards solving two such optimization problems, the author introduces and analyzes the Queue-and-Idleness-Ratio (QIR) family of routing rules.