Related papers: Fundamental limits on taming infectious disease ep…
In epidemic modeling, the term infection strength indicates the ratio of infection rate and cure rate. If the infection strength is higher than a certain threshold -- which we define as the epidemic threshold - then the epidemic spreads…
Balancing the societal costs of non-pharmaceutical interventions with epidemic suppression requires adaptive feedback control. Rather than relying on state-dependent operational caps, we formulate an infinite-horizon optimal control problem…
Social distancing has been enacted in order to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Like many authors, we adopt the classic epidemic SIR model, where the infection rate is the control variable. Its differential flatness property yields ele…
In many cases, tainted information in a computer network can spread in a way similar to an epidemics in the human world. On the other had, information processing paths are often redundant, so a single infection occurrence can be easily…
We study the problem of containing epidemic spreading processes in temporal networks. We specifically focus on the problem of finding a resource allocation to suppress epidemic infection, provided that an empirical time-series data of…
Effective epidemic control is crucial for mitigating the spread of infectious diseases, particularly when pharmaceutical interventions such as vaccines or treatments are limited. Non-pharmaceutical strategies, including mobility…
We propose a tractable epidemic model that includes containment measures. In the absence of containment measures, the epidemics spread exponentially fast whenever the infectivity rate is positive, $\lambda>0$. The containment measures are…
The design of an efficient curing policy, able to stem an epidemic process at an affordable cost, has to account for the structure of the population contact network supporting the contagious process. Thus, we tackle the problem of…
We study the effects of switching social contacts as a strategy to control epidemic outbreaks. Connections between susceptible and infective individuals can be broken by either individual, and then reconnected to a randomly chosen member of…
In this paper we investigate feedback control techniques for the COVID-19 pandemic which are able to guarantee that the capacity of available intensive care unit beds is not exceeded. The control signal models the social distancing policies…
Epidemic models often reflect characteristic features of infectious spreading processes by coupled non-linear differential equations considering different states of health (such as Susceptible, Infected, or Recovered). This compartmental…
This paper studies if and to which extent COVID-19 epidemics can be controlled by authorities taking decisions on public health measures on the basis of daily reports of swab test results, active cases and total cases. A suitably simplified…
Compartmental epidemic models have been widely used for predicting the course of epidemics, from estimating the basic reproduction number to guiding intervention policies. Studies commonly acknowledge these models' assumptions but less…
The abrupt outbreak and transmission of biological diseases has always been a long-time concern of humankind. For long, mathematical modeling has served as a simple and yet efficient tool to investigate, predict, and control spread of…
Optimal control theory in epidemiology has been used to establish the most effective intervention strategies for managing and mitigating the spread of infectious diseases while considering constraints and costs. Using Pontryagin's Maximum…
Contact tracing has been extensively studied from different perspectives in recent years. However, there is no clear indication of why this intervention has proven effective in some epidemics (SARS) and mostly ineffective in some others…
Global strategies to contain a pandemic, such as social distancing and protective measures, are designed to reduce the overall transmission rate between individuals. Despite such measures, essential institutions, including hospitals,…
When a new infectious disease (or a new strain of an existing one) emerges, as in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, different types of mobility restrictions are considered to slow down or mitigate the spread of the disease. The measures to be…
Transmission rates in epidemic outbreaks may vary over time depending on the societal response. Non-pharmacological mitigation strategies such as social distancing and the adoption of protective equipment aim precisely at reducing…
The contact structure between hosts has a critical influence on disease spread. However, most networkbased models used in epidemiology tend to ignore heterogeneity in the weighting of contacts. This assumption is known to be at odds with…