Designing Response Supply Chain Against Bioattacks

We study a prescriptive model for end-to-end design of a supply chain for medical countermeasures (MCMs) to defend against bioattacks. We model the defender's MCMs inventory prepositioning and dispensing capacity installation decisions, attacker's move, and defender's adjustable shipment decisions so as to minimize inventory and lifeloss costs subject to population survivability targets. We explicitly account for the strategic interaction between defender's and attacker's actions, assuming information transparency. We consider the affinely adjustable robust counterpart (AARC) to our problem, which enables us to deal with realistic networks comprising millions of nodes. We provide theoretical backing to the AARC performance by proving its optimality under certain conditions. We conduct a high-fidelity case study on the design of an MCMs supply chain with millions of nodes to guard against anthrax attacks in the United States. We calibrate our model using data from a wide variety of sources, including literature and field experiments. We produce policy insights that have been long sought after but elusive until now. ©2019 INFORMS

Operational research:methods and applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order