Mitigation strategies in epidemics

In this paper, we describe a multi-objective approach to determine an effective mitigation strategy during an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle. The goal of the approach is to minimize the total number of infections. In addition, the direct costs must also be minimized as a secondary objective. The animals culled and vaccinations may also be minimized, as long as the number of infections is not compromised. Thus a three-tier hierarchy of objectives exists. A framework that considers objective hierarchies during a multi-objective optimization algorithm is suggested. Results show that this produces better results than a conventional multi-objective optimization approach.