IMPACTS OF QUANTIFYING SOCIAL DISTANCING MEASURES ON MPC PERFORMANCE FOR SIR-TYPE SYSTEMS

SERENO, J.; FERRAMOSCA, A.; GONZÁLEZ, A.; D'JORGE, A.

LATIN AMERICAN APPLIED RESEARCH

Plapiqui

Año: 2023 vol. 53 p. 417 - 422

0327-0793

Currently, there has been a sharp in-crease in epidemic control research as a result of re-cent epidemic outbreaks. Several strategies aiming to minimize the Epidemic Final Size and/or to keep the Infected Peak Prevalence under a specific value were proposed. However, not many strategies focused on analyz-ing the impact of applying quantified measures in-stead of continuous control action. This analysis is a crucial aspect since policymakers design their non-pharmaceutical intervention based on a discrete scale of intensity, from mask-wearing to hard lockdown. In this work, we present a quantized-input non-linear Model Predictive Control strategy to manage non-pharmaceutical interventions during an epi-demic outbreak. The impact of quantifying the social distancing measure is computed through several sim-ulations based on a COVID-19 epidemic model and considering different quantization levels of the non-pharmaceutical intervention. Finally, the control per-formance in each quantization level is evaluated with the computation of four epidemic indices.