Multi-mode multi-skill personnel scheduling in Roll-on/Roll-off terminals

Jaehn, Florian; Wensing, Thomas; Wiedra, Frank

doi:10.1016/j.martra.2026.100156

Multi-mode multi-skill personnel scheduling in Roll-on/Roll-off terminals

Publication date

2026-06-19

Document type

Forschungsartikel

Author

Jaehn, Florian

Wensing, Thomas

Wiedra, Frank

Organisational unit

BWL, insb. Management Science und Operations Research

INFORM Institute for Operations Research and Management GmbH, Aachen, Germany

DOI

10.1016/j.martra.2026.100156

URI

https://openhsu.ub.hsu-hh.de/handle/10.24405/23946

Publisher

Elsevier

Series or journal

Maritime Transport Research

ISSN

2666-822X

Periodical volume

11

Has another version

https://openhsu.ub.hsu-hh.de/entities/publication/21098

Peer-reviewed

✅

Part of the university bibliography

✅

Language

English

Keyword

Constraint programming

Maritime transportation

Maritime transshipment

Personnel scheduling

RoRo

Abstract

This paper evaluates multi-mode multi-skill personnel scheduling in Roll-on/Roll-off (RoRo) terminals, focusing on the loading of vehicles onto a RoRo ship by internal and external personnel. In this personnel-intensive loading, vehicles in parking areas of the RoRo terminal are grouped into prioritized batches and driven by teams through a ramp onto the decks of the RoRo ship. The hierarchical objectives are to load the batches so that the highest possible sum of priorities is achieved and the lowest possible number of external teams is used. We formalize the problem by identifying the essential components of decision making and by formulating a Constraint Programming (CP) model. Furthermore, we quantify the problem by comparing the objective values of different multi-skill allocations, a two-stage optimization, and a human planner with those of the CP model. Specifically, we evaluate the resilience of multi-skill allocations of internal teams to changes in those of external teams. Moreover, a two-stage optimization improves the resilience of decision making by increasing the operational flexibility. Our findings on manual personnel scheduling by a human planner indicate that decision support systems improve the loading. This not only contributes to the theoretical understanding of personnel scheduling in RoRo terminals, but also offers managerial implications for RoRo terminal managers to achieve improvements and resilience in their real-life personnel scheduling.

Description

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Version

Published version

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