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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2011

F. RICCA ,
G. GRASSO ,
M. ALVIANO ,
M. MANNA ,
V. LIO ,
S. IIRITANO  and
N. LEONE
F. RICCA
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Matematica, Università della Calabria, 87030 Rende, Italy (e-mail: ricca@mat.unical.it)
G. GRASSO
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Matematica, Università della Calabria, 87030 Rende, Italy; and Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK (e-mail: grasso@mat.unical.it)
M. ALVIANO
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Matematica, Università della Calabria, 87030 Rende, Italy (e-mail: alviano@mat.unical.it, manna@mat.unical.it)
M. MANNA
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Matematica, Università della Calabria, 87030 Rende, Italy (e-mail: alviano@mat.unical.it, manna@mat.unical.it)
V. LIO
Affiliation:
Exeura s.r.l., Via Pedro Alvares Cabrai – C.da Lecco 87036 Rende (CS), Italy (e-mail: vincenzino.lio@exeura.it, salvatore.iiritano@exeura.it)
S. IIRITANO
Affiliation:
Exeura s.r.l., Via Pedro Alvares Cabrai – C.da Lecco 87036 Rende (CS), Italy (e-mail: vincenzino.lio@exeura.it, salvatore.iiritano@exeura.it)
N. LEONE
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Matematica, Università della Calabria, 87030 Rende, Italy (e-mail: leone@mat.unical.it)
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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.

Keywords

answer set programmingdeclarative problem solvingknowledge managementworkforce managementartificial intelligence
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , May 2012 , pp. 361 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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