Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We develop a framework for asymptotic optimization of a queueing system. The motivation is the staffing problem of call centers with 100's of agents (or more). Such a call center is modeled as an M/M/N queue, where the number of agents~$N$ is large. Within our framework, we determine the asymptotically optimal staffing level~$N^*$ that trades off agents' costs with service quality: the higher the latter, the more expensive is the former. As an alternative to this optimization, we also develop a constraint satisfaction approach where one chooses the least~$N^*$ that adheres to a given constraint on waiting cost. Either way, the analysis gives rise to three regimes of operation: quality-driven, where the focus is on service quality; efficiency-driven, which emphasizes agents' costs; and a rationalized regime that balances, and in fact unifies, the other two. Numerical experiments reveal remarkable accuracy of our asymptotic approximations: over a wide range of parameters, from the very small to the extremely large, $N^*$ is {em exactly/ optimal, or it is accurate to within a single agent. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by revisiting the square-root safety staffing principle, which is a long-existing rule-of-thumb for staffing the M/M/N queue. In its simplest form, our rule is as follows: if $c$ is the hourly cost of an agent, and $a$ is the hourly cost of customers' delay, then $N^* = R + y^*({a over c) sqrt R$, where $R$ is the offered load, and $y^*(cdot)$ is a function that is easily computable.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it