A resource task-completion forecaster (122) of an ACD (104) determines a
probability that an agent (156) will complete servicing a
presently-assigned call by a specified time horizon h. The forecaster
determines (202) the type of call that the agent is servicing, determines
(204) the amount of time t that the agent has already been servicing the
call, retrieves (206) the mean and the variance of time historically
spent by agents on servicing this type of call to completion, fits (208)
the mean and the variance to a lifetime closed-form
cumulative-probability distribution F, such as a Weibull distribution, to
determine parameters of dispersion and central tendency, evaluates (210,
212) the distribution for t and h+t, computes (216) the probability of
the agent not having completed servicing the call by now as Q=1-F(t), and
computes (218) the probability that the agent will have completed
servicing the call by the time horizon as.times..times. ##EQU00001## A
resource scheduler (124) sums (302) the probabilities P for all agents to
obtain the number of agents that are expected to be available at the time
horizon, and schedules (304) for the time horizon no more than that
number of new calls for servicing by the agents.