Efficient management of transportation logistics related to animal disease outbreaks

Vehicle routing is a key instrument to manage and control animal disease outbreaks. This paper focuses on an efficient, user-friendly and automatic procedure to manage transportation logistics to and between farms in the case of an outbreak. This procedure can be embedded into a veterinary geographical information system for the management and control of disease outbreaks. The transportation logistics for the problem at hand can be divided into two main transportation categories: (i) round itineraries, which are special cases of the travelling salesman problem, and (ii) one-to-one itineraries. Attention is given to the use of user-friendly, heuristic yet efficient algorithms for the determination of these itineraries. It is furthermore shown that the procedure is developed in such a way that the identified routes meet both national and international regulations in force during disease outbreaks.