Flexibility and Capacity Design in Service Systems
by
Zeynep Aksin Karaesmen


This talk will focus on the problem of flexibility design in service and production systems. It will provide an overview of research that explores this question and links flexibility design and capacity optimization.

Most service systems consist of multi-departmental structures corresponding to multiple types of service requests, with possibly multi-skill agents that can deal with several types of service requests. The design of flexibility in terms of agents' skill sets and assignments of requests is a critical issue for such systems. The questions of how much flexibility to have in terms of the number of skills of the agents and what type of flexibility one would like to have in terms of the composition of agents' skill sets are explored. The objective is to identify preferred flexibility structures when demand is random and capacity is finite. In order to enable a comparison of flexibility structures under optimal capacity, the capacity optimization problem for this setting is formulated as a two-stage stochastic optimization problem. A simulation-based optimization procedure for this problem using sample-path gradient estimation is then proposed and tested. This is joint work with Fikri Karaesmen.