Simulation-based evaluation of dispatching policies in service systems

A service system is an organization of the resources and processes, which interacts with the customer and produces service outcomes. Since a majority of the service systems are labor-intensive, the main re-sources are the service workers. Designing such service systems is nontrivial due to a large number of parameters and variations, but crucial for business decisions such as labor staffing. The most important design point of a service system is how and when service requests are assigned to service workers a.k.a. dispatching policy. This paper presents a framework for evaluation of dispatching policies in service systems. A discrete event simulation model of a service system in the data-center management domain is presented. We evaluate four dispatching policies on five real-life service systems. We observe that the simulation-based approach incorporates intricacies of service systems and allows comparative analysis of dispatching policies leading to more accurate decisions on labor staffing. © 2011 IEEE.