SERVICE COST AND UTILIZATION RATE OPTIMIZATION IN SERVICE SYSTEMS

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Yamagishi, Kei | Gonsalves, Tad | Itoh, Kiyoshi

Affiliations: Department of Information and Communication Sciences, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

Abstract: In service systems, service cost is the cost associated with the employment of service-providing personnel, while utilization rate is the proportion of the system's resources which are used by the incoming traffic for service. Service cost and server utilization rate are conflicting objectives in service systems. In this paper, we cast the problem as a multi-objective optimization problem and use the Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) algorithm to minimize the two conflicting objectives simultaneously. MOPSO is a fairly recent swarm intelligence meta-heuristic algorithm known for its simplicity in programming and its rapid convergence. The multi-objective optimization procedure is illustrated with the example of a practical service system. MOPSO produces a well-spread Pareto front for the two conflicting objective functions in the practical service system.

Keywords: service systems, service cost, utilization, multi-objective optimization, MOPSO

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 1-8, 2009