Team-building with answer set programming in the Gioia-Tauro seaport

TLDR

Gioia Tauro, the largest Mediterranean transshipment terminal, faces a demanding team‑building challenge that requires manual allocation of skilled personnel for each incoming ship. The study introduces an Answer Set Programming system to automatically generate employee teams for Gioia Tauro’s seaport operations. The system models the team‑building problem as an ASP optimization that enforces skill matching, workload balance, and role turnover constraints. ICO BLG currently employs the system to automate team assignments in the Gioia Tauro seaport.

Abstract

Abstract 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 employees with 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 of manual preparation per day. In this paper we present a system based on Answer Set Programming 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.