The first term of the objective function represents the total cost of the new outbreak j, estimated at the nth outbreak epoch, based on the actual resource distribution {q 1 j , q 2 j , . . . , q r j } (see (7)). The second term represents the total expected cost of outbreaks in currently unaffected regions, based on the virtual distributions {q 1s , q 2s , . . . , q rs } (7) and the regional outbreak probabilities p n s (6) . The set of constraints assures that for each resource i, the total quantity allocated (current and virtual, both nonnegative) does not exceed the total resource availability at the nth decision epoch. Note that both the objective function and the availability constraints are nonlinear in the decision variables.