Performability evaluation of emergency call center

• We evaluated the availability and performance of an important call center in Brazil.
• Our work uses heterogeneous and hierarchical modeling strategies (RBD and SPN).
• We show the system cost and proposed a new architecture to improve the availability.
• This work comprises an analysis of the impact of downtime in performance.
• The total number of missed valid calls was analyzed in relation to the discards.

Emergency call centers serve people in utmost circumstances; hence they should be highly dependable. Availability and performance are key aspects in call centers. Architectural models, service policies, and redundancies are attributes for defining and evaluating the overall operation of such systems. In this work, we performed the performability evaluation of an important emergency call center located in a large city in Brazil. The results showed that the system’s downtime is considered high, so, we proposed a new architecture to improve the system’s performability. The results obtained in this paper can be used to provide support for decisions on interventions in the emergency call center to improve its performability. It is expected that the models presented in this paper will be useful in a variety of emergency call centers.