Aujeszky's disease is a contagious viral disease that affects the central nervous system of pigs. Several eradication programs or measures are available, each of them providing different results. Determining the preferred strategy is to a large extent a matter of economic consideration.Under the EU rules, countries or regions that are Aujeszky-free can ban imports of breeding animals carrying antibodies of the disease; movements to Aujeszky-free areas from other areas of both breeding and rearing pigs are subject to strict conditions and controls, which differ depending on whether or not the area of origin has an EU-approved eradication program. If important import destinations achieve disease-free status, exporting countries that have failed to eradicate the disease will be severely penalized. Therefore, sterner demands are to be expected considering control and eradication of Aujeszky's disease in the Netherlands in the future. To meet these demands, the objective of this study was to develop a computer simulation environment in which "what-if' scenarios can be performed to explore the epidemiological and economic effects of different Aujeszky's disease control programs. The model can be used to support the choice of the optimal eradication program under various conditions, in particular from an epidemiological and economic point of view.First, a flexible economic framework to evaluate Aujeszky's disease eradication programs was developed, and illustrated with an example (Chapter 2). The framework has four elements: changes in percentage of infectious herds, changes in product quantities, changes in product prices and economic integration. Each of these elements is defined as a separate module in the simulation model and has its own input and output data, depending on the control strategy under consideration. With these elements all epidemiological and economic aspects of the disease can be monitored over time.In an illustrative example, probability distributions of the number of infectious herds corresponding ...