Abstract: In order to effectively manage human resources, small and medium-sized call centers in China usually work out monthly schedule schemes for agents. The problem under study is how to determine on/off duty dates of agents in the month and how to assign shifts to agents with the constraints of various enterprise employment regulations and the service level, so as to minimize the number of the on duty agents (i.e. optimize the cost of manpower), while keeping the shifts of each agent in the week as same as possible. A quadratic integer programming model of the problem is constructed. Considering the intractability of the model, the problem is decomposed into three sub-problems based on enterprise demands and logical analysis of the model structure. The subproblems are solved by either integer programming models or heuristic algorithm, to generate optimal solutions. The computational results show that the proposed models and heuristic algorithm can control manpower cost and meet the demands for same shift management effectively. Compared with existing weekly scheduling methods, this method can fully exploit the monthly manpower flexibility to achieve good effect on human resource allocation. The research scenario of this paper comes from a practical call center in China. The proposed model and algorithm can be used for inspiration to solve various scheduling problems in small and medium-sized call center enterprises.

Key words: call center, monthly scheduling and rostering, integer programming, heuristic