HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN MARITIME CONTAINER TERMINALS: OPTIMISATION METHODS AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

In the competitive environment of container transport, Container Terminals (CT) have to plan carefully the management of their resources and services in order to satisfy shipping companies’ requirements. Failure to do so may lead vessel operators to re-schedule their routes calling at new promising terminals. In particular, the optimal management of human resources is a major issue in port systems having low automation and high labour costs. This thesis aims at providing a large overview of current practices and issues concerning the management of dockworkers in the CT area, in order to suggest the analytical methods and policies for its improvement. The focus is on the operational plan (24/48 h), which deserves special attention because it not only determines the final system cost incurred by workforce management, but it also heavily affects the ability of the terminal to achieve high levels of productivity and to provide high quality services to shipping companies. Starting from a collaboration with two important Mediterranean Transhipment CTs, the thesis analyses features and critical issues of the human resources management problem, as it arises in these terminals, and proposes new optimisation techniques and consistent strategies to support planners in their complex decision making process. We here present and test an optimisation model for the daily allocation of workforce, that integrates undermanning personnel with the assignment of dockworkers to shift, tasks and activities, while taking into account several operating and regulatory requirements. The testing phase shows that the optimisation model can be effectively solved within a very short time by existing solvers, giving an optimal solution for all real-size instances tested. Next, the thesis demonstrates how manpower shortages in a day can be reduced by spanning the model planning horizon over two-days instead of using the standard daily planning horizon and by using the model in a rolling horizon fashion. Labour regimes play a crucial role on the dynamics of competitiveness among CTs. In particular, labour flexibility is one of the most important determinants for the resulting performances of the port systems, which are traditionally characterized by uncertain and fluctuating demand. Focusing on the Italian case, the thesis devises alternative scenarios of port-labour flexibility policies and demonstrates, by means of the above optimisation model and a cost scheme, how little changes in flexibility policies can produce a better use of the resources available, reducing the gap of competitiveness between Italian CTs and those competitors that operate under more permissive regulations. Finally, the last part of the thesis aims at investigating through empirical evidence the role played by port labour regimes (cost and regulation) in the strategic decision of a specific terminal operating system. Special attention is paid to understanding whether restrictive and limiting labour regimes can explain the tendency to port automation that is emerging in recent years. The use of multinomial logit models and a data set of 65 European CTs provides interesting insights on what strategically motivates the choice of a specific operating system rather than another one, in order to investigate important managerial and policy implications.