A methodological approach to assess the content of work in air cargo operations

Notwithstanding, the extensive studies involving the cargo terminal operations issues, a knowledge gap emerges. Literature has focused its research on the manpower assignment and the crew scheduling problems, whereas the determination of the content of work of the activities to be performed and, as a consequence, of the manpower requirements has been often neglected. Thus, filling such a gap is the goal of the present paper, which is aimed at developing a methodological approach for defining the content of work involved in air cargo terminal activities and the corresponding manpower requirements. The proposed approach requires the participation of both cargo terminal processes supervisors and operators, and deals with both data gathering and statistical analyses, and with the definition of the variables that influence the process as well. Therefore, the developed approach has been applied to a real process, and the present paper describes the performed case study and its findings.