Resource allocation for controlling epidemics: Calibrating, analyzing, and optimizing an agent-based simulation

Abstract

This is a companion article to Kasaie and Kelton (2013), and provides an extended discussion on the calibration, analysis, and optimization of an agent-based simulation (ABS) model of an epidemic. The detailed information is presented for the illustrative case of a resource-allocation (RA) problem in the control of an influenza pandemic as described in Section 4 of Kasaie and Kelton (2013). The suggested protocol, however, can be adapted to address other instances of the RA problem in the context of other infectious disease epidemics. Section 1 defines all the parameters and run conditions for the ABS model. In Section 2 we discuss calibration of the RA objective function (DALYs function) and related sensitivity analyses. An investigation of variance reduction for the ABS model is presented in Section 3. A short discussion on application of mixture design and the corresponding triangular output displays for this design is discussed in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 presents the numerical results of the RA problem using a response surface methodology optimization approach.