Hao Ding, a 2015 Kelley graduate, had been interested in supply chain management for a while and was considering a Ph.D. in operations management during his undergraduate studies.

“I always believed that the academic path fit me,” said Ding, “I approached Professor Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez, associate professor of Operations and Decision Technologies at Kelley, for guidance and gladly found more than what I asked for.” This is how Ding and Pedraza-Martinez started working together on a research project to find out if vehicle fleet reduction at some United Nations (UN) bases would be beneficial to the organization’s system.

Efficiency is important in running effective humanitarian aid operations like the UN’s efforts worldwide, and practitioners search for well-informed, research-based assessments to guide their strategies, including timely distribution of workers and goods. These distributions often occur in rocky terrain or where roads are hard to traverse, which is why organizations purchase four-wheel drive vehicles with specialized navigation tools and other features to help workers travel in this environment. However, the UN wanted to reassess their vehicle fleet needs at various locations because they might have more field cars than they needed to be efficient.

Based on the data Ding and Pedraza-Martinez received from the UN’s Procurement Office on the distribution routes and daily operations, they selected a model within existing humanitarian operations research that would work best for generating possible scenarios with varying vehicle activity. Using this model with the UN’s data, they started running different fleet scenarios to figure out how many vehicles were used and what could potentially be reduced based on the maximum efficiency at the different aid sites. Ding said, “I learned a lot from the project. With the volume of data we received from the UN, I had to learn more sophisticated functions in Excel, and later I learned SAS myself in order to better process and analyze the data. In addition, I also familiarized myself with the NodeXL which helped us better visualize our results in network roadmaps.”

After running all of these scenarios and analyzing the results, Ding and Pedraza-Martinez presented their findings and their recommendations to UN officials at the Procurement Office in New York. Pedraza-Martinez commented that he enjoyed his experience working with Ding and that “[Ding’s] ideas were crucial for the success of this research project.” Of the whole experience, Ding is incredibly grateful. “I actually regret that I didn’t take the initiative like this before my senior year. There are so many great opportunities and our professors at Kelley genuinely want to help those who have an interest in becoming a researcher.”