题　目：Staffing under Taylor's Law: A Unifying Framework for Bridging Square-root and Linear Safety Rules

嘉　宾：张晓炜，副教授，香港科技大学

主持人：江浦平 助理教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时　间：2024年3月28日（周四）10:00-11:30am

地　点：安泰楼A303室

内容简介：

Staffing rules serve as an essential management tool in service industries to attain target service levels. Traditionally, the square-root safety rule, based on the Poisson arrival assumption, has been commonly used. However, empirical findings suggest that arrival processes often exhibit an `over-dispersion' phenomenon, in which the variance of the arrival exceeds the mean. In this paper, we develop a new doubly stochastic Poisson process model to capture a significant dispersion scaling law, known as Taylor's law, showing that the variance is a power function of the mean. We further examine how over-dispersion affects staffing, providing a closed-form staffing formula to ensure a desired service level. Interestingly, the additional staffing level beyond the nominal load is a power function of the nominal load, with the power exponent lying between 1/2 (the square-root safety rule) and 1 (the linear safety rule), depending on the degree of over-dispersion. Simulation studies and a large-scale call center case study indicate that our staffing rule outperforms classical alternatives.

演讲人简介：

Xiaowei Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He earned his Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering in 2011 and M.S. in Financial Mathematics in 2010, both from Stanford University, and his B.S. in Mathematics in 2006 from Nankai University. His research focuses on methodological advances in stochastic simulation and optimization, decision analytics, and reinforcement learning, with applications in service operations management, financial technology, and digital economy. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for Management Science and Operations Research.

欢迎广大师生参加！