Facilitating Resilience during an African Swine Fever Outbreak in the Austrian Pork Supply Chain through Hybrid Simulation Modelling

Abstract

This study aimed to simulate the impact of an African swine fever (ASF) outbreak in Austria. ASF is one of the most significant and critical diseases for the global domestic pig population. Hence, the authors evaluated control strategies and identified bottlenecks during an ASF outbreak. A hybrid approach was selected, including discrete-event and agent-based simulation. An extended Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model (within a pig farm) and a standard SEIR model (between pig farms) were used to simulate the chain of infection. A total of 576 scenarios with several parameter variations were calculated to identify the influence of external factors on key performance indicators. The main results show a comparison between two control strategies anchored in law: a standard strategy (SS) and a preventive culling strategy (SC). The calculated scenarios show a difference between these strategies and indicate that with SC during an outbreak, fewer farms would be infected, and fewer pigs would be culled. Furthermore, specific geographical areas were identified, which—due to their density of pigs and farms—would be severely affected in case of an ASF outbreak. The analysis of bottlenecks in rendering plants (RPs) showed an increase in the number of days RPs were overutilized as the transmission rate increased. In addition, SS caused more days of overutilized RPs than SC.