Models for managing the impact of an epidemic

Bienstock, Daniel; Zenteno, A. Cecilia

In this paper we consider robust models for emergency staff deployment in the event of a flu pandemic. We focus on managing critical staff levels at organizations that must remain operational during such an event, and develop methodologies for managing emergency resources with the goal of minimizing the impact of the pandemic. We present numerical experiments using realistic data to study the effectiveness of our approach. The underlying methodology is that of robust optimization; we model the problem as an infinite linear program which is approximately solved using a variant of Benders decomposition.