Article ID: | iaor200971975 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 21 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 549 |
End Page Number: | 561 |
Publication Date: | Oct 2009 |
Journal: | INFORMS Journal on Computing |
Authors: | Terekhov Daria, Beck J Christopher, Brown Kenneth N |
Keywords: | queues: applications, programming: constraints |
A facility with frontroom and backroom operations has the option of hiring specialized or cross-trained workers. Cross-trained workers can be switched between the two rooms depending on demand but are more expensive than specialized ones. Assuming stochastic customer arrival and service times, we seek a smallest-cost combination of cross-trained and specialized workers, together with a policy for switching the cross-trained workers between the rooms, which satisfies constraints on the expected customer waiting time and expected number of workers in the back room. A constraint programming approach using logic-based Benders' decomposition is presented. Experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of this approach across a wide variety of problem parameters. This paper provides one of the first links between queueing optimization problems and constraint programming.