Abstract

In today’s increasingly interconnected world, outbreaks of disease or contamination can spread widely and cause considerable impact on public health. Proactively assessing the ability to identify the source of an outbreak in a networked system is a critical step in aiding emergency and operational preparedness management prior to a crisis situation. While many methods have been developed to identify the source of an outbreak once it has occurred, limited research has been devoted to developing measures to assess the overall ability of a network structure to support accurate source identification, which we call traceability. Furthermore, while significant work has focused on understanding the role of network structure on propagation dynamics, its impact on traceability has yet remained unstudied. Here, we introduce a novel, comprehensive measure of network traceability, which calculates the information …

Date

2018

Authors

Xin Lu, Abigail L. Horn, Jiahao Su, Jiang Jiang

Journal

Omega: The International Journal of Management Science

Issue

10.1016/j.omega.2018.09.004.

Publisher

Elsevier