Overview of Research Problems on Customer Contact Centers, e.g., Telephone Call Centers

• WW, Stochastic Models for the Design and Management of Customer Contact Centers: Some Research Directions. Working paper, March 2002.

Stabilizing Performance with Time-Varying Arrivals

• Otis B. Jennings, Avishai Mandelbaum, William A. Massey and WW, Server Staffing to Meet Time-Varying Demand. Management Science, vol. 42, No. 10, 1996, pp. 1383-1394.

• Linda V. Green, Peter J. Kolesar and WW, Coping with Time-Varying Demand when Setting Staffing Requirements for a Service System., Production and Operations Management (POMS), vol. 16, No. 1, January-February 2007, pp. 13-39.

• Zohar Feldman, Avishai Mandelbaum, William A. Massey and WW, Staffing of Time-Varying Queues to Achieve Time-Stable Performance, Management Science, vol. 54, No.2, February 2008, pp. 324-338.

• Yunan Liu and WW, Stabilizing Customer Abandonment in Many-Server Queues with Time-Varying Arrivals, Operations Research, Operations Research, vol. 60, No. 6, November-December 2012, pp. 1551-1564.

Real-Time Delay Estimation and Prediction to Make Delay Announcements

• Rouba Ibrahim and WW, Real-Time Delay Estimation in Overloaded Multiserver Queues with Abandonment. Management Science, vol. 55, No. 10, October 2009, pp. 1729-1742.

• Mor Armony, Nahum Shimkin and WW, The Impact of Delay Announcements in Many-Server Queues with Abandonment. Operations Research, vol. 57, No. 1, January-February 2009, pp. 66-81.

The Fundamental Queueing Principle L = lambda*W (Little's law)

• WW, A Review of L = W and Extensions. Queueing Systems, vol. 9, No. 3, 1991, pp. 235-268.

• Song-Hee Kim and WW, Statistical Analysis with Little's Law. Operations Research, vol. 61, No. 4, July-August 2013, pp. 1030-1045.

• Song-Hee Kim and WW, Estimating Waiting Times with the Time-Varying Little's Law. Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, vol. 27, 2013, pp. 471-506.

Statistical Tests of Nonhomogeneous Poisson Arrival Processes

• Song-Hee Kim and WW, Choosing Arrival Process Models for Service Systems: Tests of a Nonhomogeneous Poisson Process. Naval Research Logistics, vol. 61, No. 1, 2014, pp. 66-90.

• Song-Hee Kim and WW, Are Call Center and Hospital Arrivals Well Modeled by Nonhomogeneous Poisson Processes? Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, vol. 16, No. 3, 2014, pp. 464-480.

Appointment-Generated Arrival Processes

• Song-Hee Kim, Ponni Vel, WW and Won Chul Cha, Poisson and Non-Poisson Properties in Appointment-Generated Arrival Processes: the Case of an Endocrinology Clinic. working paper, December 2014.

Staffing Call Centers with Skill-Based Routing

• Rodney Wallace and WW, A Staffing Algorithm for Call Centers with Skill-Based Routing. Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM), vol. 7, 2005, pp. 276-294.

• Itai Gurvich and WW, Scheduling Flexible Servers with Convex Delay Costs in Many-Server Service Systems Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, vol. 11, No. 2, Spring 2009, pp. 237-253.

Responding to Unexpected Overloads in Large-Scale Service Systems

• Ohad Perry and WW, Responding to Unexpected Overloads in Large-Scale Service Systems. Management Science, vol. 55, No. 8, August 2009, pp. 1353-1367.

• Ohad Perry and WW,, A Fluid Approximation for Service Systems Responding to Unexpected Overloads. Operations Research, vol. 59, September-October 2011, pp. 1159-1170.

Golf Courses as Large-Scale Service Systems

• WW, The Maximum Throughput on a Golf Course. Production and Operations Management, published online November 20, 2014.

• Qi Fu and WW,, Models to Study the Pace of Play in Golf. working paper, 2014.

Grey-box Stochastic Models: Fitting Birth-and-Death Processes to Service System Data

• James Dong and WW, Stochastic Grey-Box Modeling of Queueing Systems: Fitting Birth-and-Death Processes to Data. Queueing Systems, published online, December 2, 2014.

• James Dong and WW, Stationary Birth-and-Death Processes Fit to Queues with Periodic Arrival Processes. working paper, 2015.

• WW, Fitting Birth-and-Death Queueing Models to Data. Statistics and Probability Letters, vol. 82, 2012, pp. 998-1004.

• WW, The Steady-State Distribution of the Mt/M/infty Queue with a Sinusoidal Arrival Rate. Operations Research Letters, vol. 42, 2014, pp. 311-318.

Motivating Call-Center Agents: Preference-Based Routing

• Michael J. Sisselman and WW, Value-Based Routing and Preference-Based Routing in Customer Contact Centers. Production and Operations Management, vol. 16, No. 3, May-June 2007, pp. 277-291.

• Michael J. Sisselman and WW, Empowering Customer-Contact Agents Via Preference-Based Routing. SeatLink White Paper paper, 2005.

• Michal Borin and Peter Bamberger, The impact of structural empowerment on individual well-being and performance: Taking agent preferences, self-efficacy and operational constraints into account. Human Relations, vol. 63, No. 2, 2010, pp.163-191.

For more research papers, see Research Publications by Ward Whitt.