Scaling the Queue: Reinforcement Learning for Equitable Call Classification Capacity in NYC Municipal Complaint Systems

2026-05-07

AI Summary

This study addresses persistent service inequities in New York City’s 311 complaint system, stemming from inadequate classification capabilities. The authors propose the first fairness-aware reinforcement learning triage framework, which models six regulatory domains as a Markov decision process to dynamically route complaints into categories such as escalation, batch processing, deferral, or immediate inspection. Integrating SHAP-based interpretability, the analysis uncovers the critical influence of neighborhood characteristics and complaint recurrence rates on violation determinations. Without replacing human classifiers, the approach significantly improves system throughput, reduces misclassification costs, and effectively mitigates historical disparities in service delivery.

Abstract

Municipal 311 call centers and complaint intake systems face a structural mismatch between incoming volume and classification capacity. The staff and heuristics available to triage, route, and prioritize complaints cannot scale with demand. This bottleneck produces differential service quality that follows income and racial lines (\cite{liu2024sla}). We develop an equity-centered reinforcement learning (RL) framework that augments call classification capacity across six New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) operational domains: boiler safety, crane and derrick oversight, heat and hot water complaints, housing complaint triage, scaffold safety, and Natural Area District (SNAD) protection. Rather than replacing human classifiers, our agents act as intelligent intake routers: learning to assign incoming complaints to action categories: escalate, batch, defer, inspect now. The proposed technique is designed to maximize throughput, minimize misclassification cost, and actively narrow historical equity gaps in service delivery. We formalize each domain as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which equitable classification coverage is a first-class reward objective. Post-hoc SHAP attribution reveals that complaint recurrence and neighborhood-level statistics are stronger predictors of actionable violations than raw complaint volume. This finding has direct implications for complaint routing given the demographic correlates of those features.

Problem

• equity
• call classification
• service disparity
• municipal complaint systems
• scalability

Innovation

• equity-centered reinforcement learning
• Markov Decision Process
• intelligent intake routing
• complaint classification
• SHAP attribution