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

The seaport of Gioia Tauro is the largest transshipment terminal of the Mediterranean Sea. 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 boats. Teams have to be carefully arranged in order to meet several constraints such as: availability of employees and their skills, contract conditions (e.g., fair distribution of the working load, turnover of the heavy/dangerous roles) etc. This makes team building a hard and expensive task requiring several hours per day to be performed manually. 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 seaport by ICO BLG, a company specialized in automobile logistics.