Emergency medical center will designate several local hospitals to treat infected individuals. Usually, this means a
certain section of the appointed hospital will be isolated for quarantining and
treating the infectious patients, but not the entire hospital. However, determining
the optimal resource allocation to control an unexpected epidemic is a complex
optimization problem. On the one hand, managers should understand how the
disease propagates and how to model the epidemic dynamics. On the other hand,
managers need to know how to bridge the gap between epidemic dynamics and
resource allocation. Therefore, an integrated model for epidemic control should
foresee the impacts of different resource allocation scenarios on epidemic development, simultaneously and interactively. This is the focus and main contributionof our book. The objective of this book is to develop a general optimization modeling framework to help decision makers minimize infections and death due to
an epidemic. The model provides information on the spread dynamics of infections,
and where and when to allocate limited resources.