Right-Sizing Humanitarian Fleet with a Model to Optimize Outsourcing

As humanitarian organizations strive to become more effective and efficient in delivering their missions, the high-value assets in their vehicle fleet are a promising target for improving performance. Vital for moving both staff and materials, research and practice confirm that humanitarian fleets are frequently oversized. Opportunities to outsource a part of the transport activity should be exploited – but how to do this optimally?

To answer this question, ETH’s HumOSCM Lab worked together with Fleet Forum and OSCE’s Mission in Kosovo (OMiK). A humanitarian organization like OMiK works with multiple transportation modes, ranging from proprietary vehicles to rental cars and taxis. Faced with these choices, decision-makers do not always have a clear understanding of which mode would be the best for any particular route. The project was initiated by OMiK’s own managers with the goal of improving internal decision-making processes so that the organization's transport requirements are met in a cost-effective way.

Together the team developed a user-friendly PC-based tool to plan and optimize fleet utilization. Today, decision-makers use to the tool to allocate available transportation modes optimally, while calculating the optimal number of vehicles required to cover the projected transport requirements. The model’s objective function minimizes total cost under the specific operational constraints faced by the humanitarian organization.

The ETH tool has been deployed by OMiK in Kosovo, whose representative presented the benefits at Fleet Forum’s 2022 conference. There are plans to test the solution in other humanitarian organizations.

For more information about the project and forthcoming publications, contact doctoral researcher Sarah Schaumann at the HumOSCM lab.