OR Practice—A Queueing Model for Telephone Operator Staffing

This paper describes a queueing model of telephone operator staffing and the application of the model. The Bell System has used the model to reduce the cost of meeting its service criteria, for planning purposes, and to help explain to regulatory agencies changes in service measurement criteria. The model deals with large server team sizes, bimodal service time distributions, nonstationary arrivals, customer abandonments and reattempts, and certain priority queueing structures.