Balancing staffing and switching costs in a service center with flexible servers

In this paper, we study the problem of balancing staffing and switching costs in a service center with multiple types of customers and time-dependent service demand. We assume that servers are flexible and can be switched from serving one type of customers to another. The objective is to minimize the total staffing and switching costs subject to service level constraints. Column generation heuristics are developed based on a formulation from the perspective of servers. Computational experiments show that the heuristics perform well. Furthermore, an extension of the model is presented for the situation where there is a penalty if some of the service requests are not covered (satisfied).