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

SERENO, JUAN; DJORGE, AGUSTINA; FERRAMOSCA, ANTONIO; GONZÁLEZ, ALEJANDRO HERNÁN

Congreso; AADECA 2023; 2023

Currently, there has been a sharp increase in epidemiccontrol research as a result of recent epidemic outbreaks.Many epidemic control proposals focus on minimizing the epidemicfinal size while maintaining the infected peak prevalenceunder a certain value concerning the available healthcare capacity.However, very few focused on analyzing the impact ofapplying quantified measures instead of continuous control actionon the design of control techniques for epidemic control. This isa crucial aspect since policymakers design their social distancingmeasures based on a discrete scale of intensity, from mask wearingto total lockdown. In this work, we present a quantized inputnon-linear Model Predictive Control strategy to managethe social distancing measure on an epidemic outbreak. Severalsimulations based on an epidemic model of COVID-19 are carriedout to analyze the controller performance, in which four differentepidemic indices and different quantization levels of the socialdistancing measure are considered.