THREE-LEVEL GLOBAL RESOURCE ALLOCATION MODEL FOR HIV CONTROL: A HIERARCHICAL DECISION SYSTEM APPROACH

Conference proceedings article

Authors / Editors

Kassa, Semu

Research Areas

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Publication Details

Author list: Kassa SM

Publisher: American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)

Place: SPRINGFIELD

Publication year: 2018

Journal: Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering (1547-1063)

Journal acronym: MATH BIOSCI ENG

Volume number: 15

Issue number: 1

Start page: 255

End page: 273

Number of pages: 19

ISSN: 1547-1063

eISSN: 1551-0018

Languages: English-Great Britain (EN-GB)

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Abstract

Funds from various global organizations, such as, The Global Fund, The World Bank, etc. are not directly distributed to the targeted risk groups. Especially in the so-called third-world-countries, the major part of the fund in HIV prevention programs comes from these global funding organizations. The allocations of these funds usually pass through several levels of decision making bodies that have their own specific parameters to control and specific objectives to achieve. However, these decisions are made mostly in a heuristic manner and this may lead to a non-optimal allocation of the scarce resources. In this paper, a hierarchical mathematical optimization model is proposed to solve such a problem. Combining existing epidemiological models with the kind of interventions being on practice, a 3-level hierarchical decision making model in optimally allocating such resources has been developed and analyzed. When the impact of antiretroviral therapy (ART) is included in the model, it has been shown that the objective function of the lower level decision making structure is a non-convex minimization problem in the allocation variables even if all the production functions for the intervention programs are assumed to be linear.

Keywords

epidemiological modeling, hierarchical optimization, hierarchical planning, HIV, Multilevel resource allocation

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