Abstract Manager

Background and Key Issues:

The Yukon Territory presents unique challenges due to its vast geography and small population of under 50,000 residents. Despite the number of inhabitants and associated constraints on funding, the region requires extensive service delivery. Since the construction of the Alaska highway the population has increased significantly, nearly doubling in the last 40 years. This growth has necessitated the expansion of the transportation network, but the systems for organization and decision-making have not kept pace.

Currently, there is no structured framework for fleet management, leading to a reliance on the knowledge and experience of individuals. There is a critical need to analyse the overall service delivery system, and to formalize the links between service needs and fleet requirements. The Functional Classification project aims to extract knowledge from key personnel to formalize decision-making methodologies, and to apply a critical lens to the mechanisms of service delivery. This project aligns with other Yukon Transportation initiatives, such as the Highways Functional Classification, and aims to develop decision models for transparent, objective, and reproducible decision-making.

The Fleet Functional Classification will be used to inform real-time decisions, such as resource allocation, repair and maintenance priority, and lifecycle replacements. It is also linked to strategic transportation planning outcomes, such as long-term investment prioritization and risk management. The framework supports system-level operational performance through improved safety and reliability, resulting in increased service delivery resilience across the network. Both operational and strategic tiers of equipment management benefit from criticality-based prioritization; this defensible and evidence-based asset management tool results in improved fleet decisions, which benefit the diverse communities and geographic regions of the territory.

Methodology and Conclusions:

The development of the Fleet Functional Classification started with existing inventory and the services each equipment type supports. The classification includes both light and heavy-duty units, as well ancillary equipment that is essential to service delivery. The first steps involved developing comprehensive service lists and scoring them based on three Yukon Transportation service objectives: Safety, Financial Stewardship, and Comfort and Convenience. Each vehicle or piece of equipment is then scored based on the number and relative importance of the services it supports.

An initial classification system has been developed for the Transportation Division, covering a majority subset of The Yukon Government’s fleet. Alongside this, additional decision model measures are being developed to capture a unit’s importance to service delivery and the network as a whole. These measures include an asset criticality framework and analysis, formal condition evaluation, asset utilization by unit and series, local and territorial redundancy, and regulatory compliance. This structured approach ensures that fleet management decisions are aligned with service delivery needs and strategic objectives, providing a consistent and transparent methodology for prioritizing and managing transportation assets in the Yukon Territory.