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Talks and Poster Presentations (with Proceedings-Entry):

A. Beer, J. Gärtner, N. Musliu, W. Schafhauser, W. Slany:
"Scheduling Breaks in Shift Plans for Call Centers";
Talk: The 7th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, Montreal; 08-18-2008 - 08-22-2008; in: "Proceedings of PATAT 2008 - The 7th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling", (2008), 17 pages.



English abstract:
In this paper we consider a real-life break scheduling problem for call center agents involving a large number of breaks and constraints. Obtaining good solutions for this problem increases the well-being of call center employees and guarantees a certain quality of service for calling customers. To solve this problem we present two local search approaches, a min-conflicts based search algorithm and a tabu search algorithm and consider a hybridization of both techniques. Our computational experiments reveal that the presented techniques generate high-quality solutions to our problems in reasonable time. These solutions are able to satisfy the needs of customers, call center agents, and employers at the same time.

Keywords:
Break scheduling, Min-conflicts heuristic, Tabu search, Call centers

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.