On dispatching unequally capable service technicians

A common problem that faces many high-tech electronic product companies is how to effectively provide systems support for their products/machines/systems installed at various customer sites using different levels of technical personnel. The problem can be viewed as a model with multiple level servers and multiple volume demands. In this paper, a semi-Markov decision process with average criterion has been employed to formulate the dynamics of the system. Optimal policies for human resource allocation decision with minimum costs have been derived and the loss rate for customer requests has been considered. We prove that the embedding Markov chain is ergodic, induced by any stationary deterministic policy. We obtain some related parameters which can answer questions from managers. We also provide some numerical examples.