Staffing, Routing, and Payment to Trade off Speed and Quality in Large Service Systems

Abstract

Three fundamental questions when operating a service system are (1) how many employees to staff, and (2) how to route work to them, and (iii) how to pay them. These questions have often been studied separately; that is, the queueing and network-design literature that considers staffing and workload routing generally ignores payment, and the literature on employee payment generally ignores issues surrounding staffing and routing. In “Staffing, Routing, and Payment to Trade Off Speed and Quality in Large Service Systems,” D. Zhan and A.R. Ward study how the aforementioned three decisions jointly affect system throughput and the quality of the service delivered when the employers maximize their own payment. They find that the system manager should first solve a joint optimization problem to determine the staffing level, the routing policy, and the service speed, and second, design a payment contract under which the employees work at the desired service speed.