Efficient ticket routing by resolution sequence mining

Abstract

IT problem management calls for quick identification of resolvers to reported problems. The efficiency of this process highly depends on ticket routing - -transferring problem ticket among various expert groups in search of the right resolver to the ticket. To achieve efficient ticket routing, wise decision needs to be made at each step of ticket transfer to determine which expert group is likely to be, or to lead to the resolver. In this paper, we address the possibility of improving ticket routing efficiency by mining ticket resolution sequences alone, without accessing ticket content. To demonstrate this possibility, a Markov model is developed to statistically capture the right decisions that have been made toward problem resolution, where the order of the Markov model is carefully chosen according to the conditional entropy obtained from ticket data. We also design a search algorithm, called Variable-order Multiple active State search(VMS), that generates ticket transfer recommendations based on our model. The proposed framework is evaluated on a large set of real-world problem tickets. The results demonstrate that VMS significantly improves human decisions: Problem resolvers can often be identified with fewer ticket transfers. © 2008 ACM.