Abstract
Call Centres act as the first point of contact used by either organisations or their customers for services. The progressive technological advancement has seen call centres shift to what is now termed as contact centre because of the multiple media types used for communication. The Virtual Call Centre Environment is a derivative of these advances in technology, with call routing as one of the main tools for creating the virtual environment.When proposing a new call routing algorithm, it is critical to determine its precise scope and evaluate it with accurate modelling of the underlying protocols and communication mechanisms. Also to the best of our knowledge within the context of performance comparison there has not been any research that takes the model of a real system into account. The motivation for the research presented in this thesis is to develop new simulation models capable of creating valid Virtual Call Centre Environments that will act as a test-bed for the well-known call routing algorithms.
In this thesis a novel hybrid call routing algorithm called Enhanced Bandwidth-Delay based Routing Algorithm (EBDRA) capable of supporting multiple distributed call centres within the Packet Switch Virtual Call Centre Environment is developed and tested using real-world data. Input and output parameters generated from this real world data set were also utilised to aid model validation, verification and scenario generation.
Performance comparisons between several call routing algorithms and the novel EBDRA routing algorithm was performed using both analytical and simulation methods. MATLAB and OPNET software packages representing the analytical and simulation methods respectively were used to study the effects different input and output parameters have on each routing algorithm discussed in this thesis.
The results show that the novel hybrid algorithm EBDRA was able to reduce the overall call delay and queue size of the Packet Switch Virtual Call Centre Environment, providing a Quality Driven system under high and low call traffic flow.
| Date of Award | 2009 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Hadi Larijani (Supervisor) & Mike Mannion (Supervisor) |