Valuing Flexibility in the Control of Contagious Animal Disease (Draft)

Animal epidemics can bring severe damage to the livestock sector as well as the whole society. In controlling animal epidemic, the selection of suboptimal control strategies may lead to unnecessary costs which should be avoided. This paper argues that uncertainties about the state of the epidemic, irreversible actions like culling and vaccination of animals, and the possibility of learning during the epidemic requires control strategies to be flexible and the value of flexibility should be considered when evaluating control strategies. Based on Markov decision process (MDP) and dynamic programming, a decision support framework is developed to determine the optimal control strategy which accounts for uncertainties as well as flexibility in the dynamic decision making process. A numerical example illustrates our approach to quantify the value of flexibility.