Article ID: | iaor2017389 |
Volume: | 64 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 1033 |
End Page Number: | 1050 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2016 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Wierman Adam, Ward Amy R, Doroudi Sherwin, Gopalakrishnan Ragavendran |
Keywords: | networks, service, allocation: resources, personnel & manpower planning, behaviour, markov processes, simulation |
Traditionally, research focusing on the design of routing and staffing policies for service systems has modeled servers as having fixed (possibly heterogeneous) service rates. However, service systems are generally staffed by people. Furthermore, people respond to workload incentives; that is, how hard a person works can depend both on how much work there is and how the work is divided between the people responsible for it. In a service system, the routing and staffing policies control such workload incentives; and so the rate servers work will be impacted by the system’s routing and staffing policies. This observation has consequences when modeling service system performance, and our objective in this paper is to investigate those consequences. We do this in the context of the