Impacts of quantifying social distancing measures on MPC performance for SIR-type systems

SERENO, JUAN E.; FERRAMOSCA, ANTONIO; GONZÁLEZ, ALEJANDRO H.; D' JORGE, AGUSTINA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 28º Congreso Argentino de Control Automático; 2023

Currently, there has been a sharp increase in epidemic control research as a result of recent epidemic outbreaks. Several strategies aiming to minimize the epidemic’s final size and/or to keep the infected peak prevalence under a specific value determined by the available healthcare capacity were proposed. However, not many focused on analyzing the impact of applying quantified measures instead of continuous control action. This is a crucial aspect since policymakers design their non-pharmaceutical intervention based on a discrete scale of intensity - going from simple 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 epidemic outbreak. Several simulations based on an epidemic model of COVID-19 are carried out to analyze the controller performance, in which four different epidemic indices and different quantization levels of non-pharmaceutical intervention are considered.