Team-building with Answer Set Programming in the Gioia-Tauro Seaport

TL;DR

This paper presents an ASP-based system for automating team building in the Gioia Tauro seaport, optimizing personnel allocation to meet various operational constraints, thereby reducing manual effort.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel ASP-based approach for automated team formation in a large seaport, addressing complex constraints and operational requirements.

Findings

System is actively used in Gioia Tauro seaport

Automates team allocation, reducing manual planning time

Handles complex constraints like skills and workload distribution

Abstract

(To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).) The seaport of Gioia Tauro is the largest transshipment terminal of the Mediterranean coast. A crucial management task for the companies operating in the seaport is team building: the problem of properly allocating the available personnel for serving the incoming ships. Teams have to be carefully arranged in order to meet several constraints, such as allocation of the employees with the appropriate skills, fair distribution of the working load, and turnover of the heavy/dangerous roles. This makes team building a hard and expensive task requiring several hours per day of manual preparation. In this paper we present a system based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) for the automatic generation of the teams of employees in the seaport of Gioia Tauro. The system is currently exploited in the Gioia Tauro seaport by ICO BLG, a company specialized in automobile logistics.