Abstract
This chapter starts with a brief review of the birth of operations research (OR) in a war-focused homeland security setting. In more frequent non-war settings, homeland security requires diligent planning for and responding to low probability, high consequence (LPHC) events. Resulting decisions are described by time frame, from long-term planning decisions to minute-to-minute operational decisions. After a brief review of OR tools and techniques and of related literature, the chapter then provides details of recent OR research by the authors into a major threat to homeland security: pandemic influenza. In the context of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic flu, we examine a supply chain problem in pandemic flu response: the manufacture, delivery, and administering of flu vaccine. Using a combination of axiomatically derived OR models and data obtained from a representative sample of states of the USA, we evaluate the effectiveness of the deployment of flu vaccines in 2009. We show that, for many states, the vaccines arrived far too late to be useful. We suggest alternative vaccine allocation policies that could dramatically increase the numbers of flu infections averted. We offer practical takeaways for those whose responsibility it is to design homeland security response strategies for their own states and communities.
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Acknowledgments
Work on this chapter was supported by the Sloan Foundation of New York under a grant entitled Decision-Oriented Analysis of Pandemic Flu Preparedness & Response and under a cooperative agreement with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), grant number 1 PO1 TP000307-01, LAMPS (Linking Assessment and Measurement to Performance in PHEP Systems), awarded to the Harvard School of Public Health Center for Public Health Preparedness (HSPHCPHP) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals (CESF). The discussion and conclusions in this chapter are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Sloan Foundation, the CDC, the US Department of Health and Human Services, Harvard, or MIT.
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Larson, R.C., Teytelman, A., Finkelstein, S. (2013). Operations Research and Homeland Security: Overview and Case Study of Pandemic Influenza. In: Herrmann, J. (eds) Handbook of Operations Research for Homeland Security. International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, vol 183. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5278-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5278-2_2
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