An ASP-Based System for Team-Building in the Gioia-Tauro Seaport

We have developed a system based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) for the automatic generation of the teams of employees in the seaport of Gioia Tauro. The problem here is to generate a correct allocation of the available personnel of the international seaport of Gioia Tauro in such a way that the right processing of the shoring cargo boats is guaranteed. To this end several constraints have to be satisfied. Depending on the size and the load of cargo boats, an appropriate number of employees of different skills is required. The selection of the employees and the role they play in the team (each employee might cover several roles according with his/her skills) are subject to many conditions (e.g., fair distribution of the working load, tournament of the heavy/dangerous roles, etc.) The system can build new teams, complete the allocation automatically when some key employees are fixed manually, and check the correctness of manually generated team, providing proper explainations if no correct team can be generated. In this application, the domain is modeled by exploiting ASP and implemented by using the ASP system DLV. A set of suitably defined logic programs is exploited for finding the desired allocation. The pure declarative nature of the language allowed us for refining and tuning both problem specifications and encodings together while interacting with the stakeholders of the seaport. It is worth noting that the possibility of modifying (by editing text files) in a few minutes a complex reasoning task (e.g. by adding new constraints), and testing it “on-site” together with the customer was a great advantage of our approach. The system is currenty exploited by the ICO BLG company at the seaport of Gioia Tauro.