Method and apparatus for skills-based task routing

The invention relates to the field of service center operation. Specifically, it relates to efficiently selecting agents for servicing incoming tasks or outgoing tasks based on sets of skills required to service the individual tasks. The invention further relates to selecting agents having adequate, but minimal, skills to service these tasks. An efficient algorithm is presented for selecting an agent to service a task in a skills-based routing system. A set X is determined of all states of the boolean variables that contain the required skills for a task. A resume table of available agents is built, organized by the states of the N variables; each agent is represented in each state that includes all skills possessed by the agent. All available and qualified agents are determined from the resume table; those agents associated with a state of the resume table outside of the set X are disqualified. An agent is selected from those remaining. Preferably, an agent is selected having a minimum qualification level to service the task. One preferred way of doing this is to subtract from the number of terms in a canonical form of the required skills expression a number equal to the number of times the agent appears in the set of states X and picking an agent with the lowest result. In the preferred embodiment, however, proficiency levels of each required skill are taken into account in making the final selection.