Contact Center Scheduling with Strict Resource Requirements

Abstract

Consider the following problem which often arises in contact center scheduling scenarios. We are given a set of employees where each employee can be deployed for shifts consisting of L consecutive time units. Further, each employee specifies a set of possible start times, and can be deployed for a bounded number of shifts only. At each point of time t, we are also given a lower bound r t on the number of employees that should be present at this time. The goal is to find a schedule for the employees such that the number of time slots whose requirements are met is maximized. Such problems naturally arise in many other situations, e.g., sensor networks and cloud computing.