The Facts on the Ground: Evaluating Humanitarian Fleet Management Policies Using Simulation

Gu, Liyi; Ryzhov, Ilya O.; Eftekhar, Mahyar

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3210334

Cited by 1 publication

(4 citation statements)

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“…Third, the office earns revenue through selling used vehicles. Due to the environmental conditions, in which HOs operate vehicle disposal may not follow a preset policy of 5-year or 150,000 km whichever comes first (Gu et al 2018;Pedraza Martinez and Van Wassenhove 2013). This is confirmed with Figure 2 showing that the age (of 5 years) and cumulative odometer (of 150,000 km) play no significant role to dismiss a vehicle.…”

Section: Financial Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, security problems, the lack of reliable roads and poor infrastructure depreciate vehicles less predictably than under normal conditions and increase the chance of accidents (Eftekhar and Van Wassenhove 2016). Therefore, instead of following a preset policy based on age or mileage to dispose used vehicles, field offices might get rid of used vehicles much later or earlier than planned (Gu et al 2018). Second, due to the lack of funding for maintenance and fuel, the available vehicles may not always be usable (McCoy and Lee 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, instead of following a preset policy based on age or mileage to dispose used vehicles, field offices might get rid of used vehicles much later or earlier than planned (Gu et al. 2018). Second, due to the lack of funding for maintenance and fuel, the available vehicles may not always be usable (McCoy and Lee 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2014), replacement policy and vehicle reliability (McCoy and Lee 2014, Pedraza Martinez and Van Wassenhove 2013), field‐vehicle utilization (Eftekhar and Van Wassenhove 2016, Gu et al. 2018) and the fleet‐sizing question (Eftekhar et al. 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

An Approach for Managing Operating Assets for Humanitarian Development Programs

Fard

Eftekhar

Papier

2019

Production and Operations Management

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Every year, humanitarian organizations assign a sizable portion of their limited financial resources to procure, operate and maintain operating assets, without which service delivery would be nearly impossible. In this study, using vehicles to represent operating assets, we identify policies for sizing and allocating operational capacity to minimize the expected deprivation costs in a humanitarian development context. First, we develop a stochastic dynamic programming model, and then an efficient heuristic policy that considers the interaction of asset purchasing and operating decisions when the budget is uncertain. Based on a dataset provided by a large international organization, we estimate the parameters of our model to run numerical experiments. Results demonstrate the following: (i) Although budget uncertainty increases the expected deprivation costs and decreases capacity utilization, the negative impact of budget uncertainty is mitigated if budget savings between periods is allowed; (ii) a policy for minimizing the expected deprivation costs over time may avoid using all available assets in all periods; (iii) in situations in which the variation in the criticality of missions is large, both the expected deprivation costs and fleet utilization decrease; and (iv) in most conditions, a centralized asset procurement model outperforms a decentralized model, not only in terms of logistic costs but also in minimizing the expected deprivation costs.

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Section: Financial Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%