SARIMA models for forecasting call volume in emergency services

Abstract

Management of manpower and other resources is one of the most important tasks to be carried out in any business organisation. Various approaches are followed for the planning activities in industry and business. This article discusses the manpower planning and allocation problem in a call centre, working round the clock for handling emergency telephone calls related to ambulance services. The organisation under study provides ambulance services to take care of the emergency needs of the people in one of the Indian states. As a first step in the manpower planning process, we develop time series models for forecasting the call volume. Time series models were used to explain the evolution of hourly and daily call volume data. As the series was showing seasonality, seasonal ARIMA models were fitted for these data. The adequacy tests confirm that the selected model performs well for the data. The short-term forecasts computed using the model seen to be very close to the corresponding observed values. These forecast values will be helpful in manpower and resource planning.