Real-Time Scheduling Policies for Multiclass Call Centers with Impatient Customers

Motivated by call centers applications, we consider a queueing system with two classes of customers, important and low important ones. We allow customers to be impatient, that is one customer may leave the system before beginning service. We focus on scheduling policies that assign customers, upon arrival, to parallel queues, high and low priority queues. The policies are developed subject to satisfying constraints on performances related to the fraction of customers served, the mean and the variance of the waiting time in queue. We analyze several dynamic scheduling policies in order to meet our objective. These policies are characterized to be simple and easy to implement in practice