Evidence-Based Vehicle Planning for Humanitarian Field Operations

Problem description: There is substantial discontent about vehicle planning in international humanitarian organizations. In response, academics have proposed an increasing number of advanced decision support tools for planning and routing. Yet, success stories about their implementation are lacking. Relevance: Transportation is, after salaries, the second largest cost category for international humanitarian organizations. Increasing needs for humanitarian interventions combined with steady declines in funding indicate that improved planning and routing could have a substantial positive impact on beneficiaries. Methodology: We assess applicability and cost-effectiveness of advanced planning approaches by means of interviews with humanitarian logistics experts, a literature review, and extensive numerical analyses. The latter are based on a queuing model that relates the effectiveness of a planning system to its characteristics and the operational context. Results: Effectiveness increase realized by advanced approaches tends to be marginal in many humanitarian contexts - due to triviality of planning problems and external constraints - whereas costs increases can be substantial. Moreover, advanced approaches tend to substantially underperform when information is inaccurate or missing, as is the case in many humanitarian contexts. Even if advanced systems are cost-effective, their implementation tends to have low priority due to capacity shortages and competing innovations. Managerial implications: Planning system design should be based on thorough contextual understanding and critical cost-effectiveness analyses. Our paper presents general insights that can assist organizations in doing so. Moreover, our results urge research to evidence the contexts in which proposed tools can be cost-effective.