Articles

Models for managing the impact of an influenza epidemic

Bienstock, Daniel; Zenteno Langle, Ana Cecilia

We present methodologies for managing the impact of workforce absenteeism on the operational continuity of public services during an influenza epidemic. From a planner’s perspective, it is of paramount importance to design contingency plans to administer resources on the face of such an event; however, there is significant complexity underlying this task, stemming from uncertainty on the likely severity and evolution of the epidemic. Our approach involves the procurement of additional resources in response to a robust model of the evolution of the epidemic. We develop insights on the structure of optimal robust strategies and on practical rules-of-thumb that can be applied should an epidemic take place. We present numerical examples that illustrate the effectiveness of our results.

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Academic Units
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Published Here
October 29, 2012

Notes

Submitted to Operations Research.