A rostering approach to minimize health risks for workers: An application to a container terminal in the Italian port of Genoa

The evolving safety regulation is pushing seaports to comply with safety measures for workers perform- ing heavy loads handling and repetitive movements. This paper proposes a risk-aware rostering approach in maritime container terminals, i.e., it addresses the rostering problem of minimizing and balancing workers’ risk in such terminals. To this end, a mixed integer mathematical programming model incor- porating workforce risks is proposed, considering constraints such as the satisfaction of the workforce demand to perform the terminal operations, the worker-task compatibility and restrictions on the se- quence of tasks assigned to the same worker. The model has been successfully applied to plan workforce over a six months horizon in a real container terminal located in Northern Italy, the Southern European Container Hub (SECH) in Genoa. As the workforce demand in SECH terminal is available at most two weeks in advance, a rolling horizon planning approach is devised. Experimental tests on real data pro- vided by SECH terminal over a six months planning horizon highlight the effectiveness of the approach - the maximum monthly risk for workers is reduced by 33.9% compared to the current planning –and suitability to other container terminal contexts. Moreover, the model is applicable to a broad range of port situations, and robust enough to need little adaptation.