Planning and optimising manpower management in a transshipment container terminal

Manpower management is a complex problem for transshipment container terminals, because different requirements must be taken into account in the short-term plan to properly assign workers to shifts, tasks and operations, while accounting for some decisions already made in the long-term plan. An optimisation model is formulated to discuss the decision-making ability of a real terminal in dealing with this problem. The experimentation shows that its current policy on the short-term plan is effective, but some improvements can be obtained if unnecessary restrictions were removed from the long-term plan and some changes are accepted in the current modus operandi of the terminal. [Received 16 February 2015; Revised 4 January 2016; Accepted 13 June 2016]