Logistics and operations planning with Médecins Sans Frontières: a hands on workshop

By Seth Taylor and Mila Starling

At the end of November, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the University of Edinburgh, and Stellenbosch University collaborated to host an Operations Research workshop focused on the challenges of planning logistical operations for delivering high-quality medical care in complex environments. The two-day event brought together MSF staff, academics, and industry professionals, creating a space for shared learning, practical modelling, and cross-disciplinary discussion.

Day 1

The first day started with Dr Jose Luis Álvarez Morán,  giving a talk on coverage in public health planning. The session gave insight into the operations of MSF, and the logistical challenges behind providing healthcare services to members of rural communities. These issues emphasise the importance of using operations research in healthcare logistics to enable good quality care for all members in society.

Dr Carla Schutte gave an insightful talk on local community involvement for humanitarian relief. The presentation showed all the ways the community can help one another and larger humanitarian relief organisations, through volunteering time and resources. The group discussed the ways local community involvement has helped them, and the ways these involvements can help people in need of relief.

After a tea break, Dr Andries Heyns spoke about his work with MSF in creating maps for humanitarian site locations. He showed the ways volunteers help MSF to create usable road maps for regions that don’t have extensive mapping, making it possible for locals and MSF field staff to navigate these areas and provide aid. The talk ended with a live demo of a tool made in collaboration with MSF that uses GIS data to calculate the accessibility of humanitarian sites within a pre-defined region. The tool uses estimates of walking speed and takes terrain features into account when assessing how accessible sites are, with further updates coming soon. The tool gives an interesting insight into the ways modelling can be used to enhance decision support, and guide stakeholders in understanding the need of local communities for more accessible healthcare options.

Following lunch, the group launched into the modelling workshop hosted by Dr Kit Searle and Dr Andries Heyns. The workshop focussed on healthcare facility placement within southern Madagascar. The room was divided into groups, with the goal of finding optimal placements for the facilities based on three primary metrics. Reduction measured how much total benefit sites provide, coverage showed how many people are served by a site, and fairness approximated how well remote or underserved communities are supported. Groups were free to take any approach they wanted, with the aim of placing facilities that best served the population.

Day 1 ended with an opportunity to join the ORSSA Stellenbosch social and awards ceremony at Thirsty Scarecrow, for drinks, food and lively conversations. A blog post on this event can be found here.

Day 2

Day two began with Dr Kit Searle, who introduced a multi-objective optimisation algorithm for locating humanitarian facilities. He outlined the strategies used to construct the objectives that participants engaged with during the modelling workshop, and explained the approach taken to solve this complex placement problem. The discussion highlighted the inherent difficulty of balancing conflicting objectives, as well as ongoing challenges, particularly how to define and measure fairness, a component intended to ensure that remote and underserved communities also receive access to essential resources.

This was followed by a virtual presentation by Dr Christa Searle, who spoke on bridging behaviour and logistics through agent-based simulation modelling. She provided an introduction to how agent-based models operate before demonstrating it could be applied in humanitarian settings. Dr Searle illustrated the power of this approach by sharing two projects in which she had used agent-based modelling. The first project was a simulation of influenza in a refuge camp and the second simulated tuberculosis in informal settlements. These examples highlighted how behavioural patterns, movement, and environmental factors can meaningfully influence system outcomes, and how simulation can help decision-makers anticipate challenges and design more effective interventions.

After a tea break, the programme continued with Dr Linke Potgieter, who presented her work on resource allocation modelling during an epidemic. Her talk focused on evaluating drones as a potential delivery method and comparing their feasibility against traditional truck-based approaches. Unlike the earlier agent-based examples, Dr Potgieter used a population-level simulation approach, drawing on an epidemic progression model, which she introduced and explained to the group. Her simulation was based on a measles outbreak and examined how to deliver vaccines efficiently under varying logistical and epidemiological conditions. The session sparked an engaging discussion about the unpredictability of human behaviour—such as patients avoiding treatment after receiving a diagnosis, and how models might need to adapt to different outbreak scales, from small localised clusters to large, widespread epidemics.

Following lunch, participants reconvened for the second half of the modelling workshop, where they continued refining the models they had begun the previous day. The session culminated in a series of group presentations in which each team shared their final results and outlined the modelling approaches and decision-making steps that led them there. This interactive component allowed participants to compare strategies and reflect on how different optimisation objectives shaped outcomes.

The workshop offered a valuable opportunity to explore how Operations Research can support humanitarian decision-making in complex environments. Through talks, discussions, and hands-on modelling, participants gained practical insight into the optimisation, simulation, and resource-allocation challenges faced by MSF. Thank you to the presenters, organisers, and attendees for making this event possible, as well as to MSF, the University of Edinburgh, and Stellenbosch University for their support.