Analysis for epidemic diffusion and emergency demand in an anti-bioterrorism system.

Unlike logistics management in which all the activities are triggered based on customer orders, emergency logistics network in an anti-bioterrorism system is triggered based on the epidemic diffusion network. The first important step for efficient emergency rescue is to depict the time-varying demand for emergency resources. In this article, two different epidemic diffusion models (SIQRS, SEIQRS) are analysed based on a small-world network. Thus, threshold of the epidemic diffusion and key parameters for controlling the epidemic diffusion are obtained. Then we propose a time-varying forecasting model for the demand for emergency resources in the epidemic area and we decompose the entire emergency rescue process into three mutually correlated substages. To each substage, we present a corresponding suggestion for emergency distribution based on the dynamic demand rule. Generally, these works can provide some guidelines for decision makers when coping with emergency rescue problems pertinent to bioterrorism. Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.