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Locating and staffing service centers under service level constraints

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  • Venkateshan, Prahalad
  • Mathur, Kamlesh
  • Ballou, Ronald H.

Abstract

Many firms experience demand from geographically dispersed customers. This demand is satisfied by mobile servers that travel to the site of the customer. To achieve this in a cost-effective manner, the firm needs to decide where to locate its service centers, which customer regions to assign to the centers and the staffing level at each center so that customers experience a defined level of service at minimum cost. To determine adequate staffing levels, we approximate a service center and the customer regions assigned to it as an M/G/s queueing system. Based on this queueing model, we explore properties of two different staffing level functions. The queueing model is embedded in a large-scale integer program. Using the concept of column generation, we develop an algorithm that can efficiently solve moderate-sized problems.

Suggested Citation

  • Venkateshan, Prahalad & Mathur, Kamlesh & Ballou, Ronald H., 2010. "Locating and staffing service centers under service level constraints," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 201(1), pages 55-70, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:201:y:2010:i:1:p:55-70
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Prahalad Venkateshan & Kamlesh Mathur, 2015. "A Heuristic for the Multisource Weber Problem with Service Level Constraints," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 49(3), pages 472-483, August.
    2. Ayfer Basar & Özgür Kabak & Y. Ilker Topcu, 2017. "A Decision Support Methodology for Locating Bank Branches: A Case Study in Turkey," International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making (IJITDM), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 16(01), pages 59-86, January.
    3. Susana Baptista & Rui Oliveira, 2012. "A case study on the application of an approximated hypercube model to emergency medical systems management," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 20(4), pages 559-581, December.
    4. Venkateshan, Prahalad & Ballou, Ronald H. & Mathur, Kamlesh & Maruthasalam, Arulanantha P.P., 2017. "A Two-echelon joint continuous-discrete location model," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 262(3), pages 1028-1039.

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