Solving Employee Timetabling in a Call Center of a Telecommunications Company in Mexico with Simulated Annealing

Timetabling is a problem that arises in many application areas such as telecommunications. Call-center enterprises are companies that search for schedules that minimize the resources spent to attend customer calls. Given that the constraints to create an acceptable schedule vary from one call center to another, it is not possible to find a polynomial time algorithm that fits the requirements of all cases. In this paper is presented a case of study of the employee timetabling in a call center (ETCC) of a telecommunications company in Mexico. ETCC instances were solved using an implementation of a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. The best values for the parameters of the SA were defined in a tuning phase based on covering arrays (CA). The results show an improvement of 19% between the solution achieved by the SA and a lower bound known for an instance of ETCC problem.