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

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

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 28th Congreso de la Asociacion Argentina 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 Final Size and/or to keep the Infected Peak Prevalence under a specific value were proposed.However, not many strategies focused on analyzing the impact of applying quantified measures instead 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 epidemic outbreak. The impact of quantifying the social distancing measure is computed through several simulations based on a COVID-19 epidemic model and considering different quantization levels of the non-pharmaceutical intervention. Finally, the control performance in each quantization level is evaluated with the computation of four epidemic indices.