Members of ERC Scale-Freeback are contributing in fighting against to the COVID-19. ERC project agrees and endorses the principles of the COVID-19 Research Manifesto. The ERC also support the principle of reproducibly research, and contribute to maximizing the accessibility of research result by sharing the data and computation codes.
In particular, Scale-FreeBack is participating to the following research problems:
1. Modeling and Control of COVID-19 Epidemic through Testing Policies.
Abstract: Testing for the infected cases is one of the most important mechanisms to control an epidemic. It enables to detect and isolate at least some of the infected individuals, thereby limiting the disease transmission to the susceptible population. However, despite the significance of such policies, the recent literature on the subject lacks a control-theoretic perspective. In this work, an epidemic model that incorporates testing rate as a control input is presented. First, the model is estimated and validated for COVID-19 data in France. Then, two testing policies are proposed, the so-called best-effort strategy for testing (BEST), and the constant optimal strategy for testing (COST). The BEST policy is a suppression strategy that provides a lower bound on the testing rate such that the epidemic switches from a spreading to a non-spreading phase. The COST policy is a mitigation strategy that provides an optimal value of testing rate that minimizes the peak value of the infected population when the total stockpile of tests is limited. Both testing policies are evaluated by predicting the number of active intensive care unit (ICU) cases and the cumulative number of deaths due to COVID-19.
Status: Finalized.
Publications:
Modeling and Control of COVID-19 Epidemic through Testing Policies
Muhammad Umar B. Niazi, Alain Kibangou, Carlos Canudas-de-Wit, Denis Nikitin, Liudmila Tumash, Pierre-Alexandre Bliman
Annual Reviews in Control, Special issue on Systems and Control Research efforts against COVID-19 and Future Pandemics
HAL arXiv
Data: The set of files indicated in the table below can be downloaded directly via the zip file Data used in the paper.
| File name | Description | Sources | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| COVID19_France_RawData.csv | Data: infected, dead, etc… | Raw data from public source | CSV |
| COVID19_France_RawData.mat | Data: infected, dead, etc… | Raw data from public source | Matlab |
| COVID19_France_ImputedData.csv | Imputed data: infected, dead, etc… | Imputed data | CSV |
| COVID19_France_ImputedData.mat | Imputed data: infected, dead, etc… | Imputed data | Matlab |
| cost_policy.m and f_function.m | Code to find the optimal values of the COST strategy | Matlab | |
| param_estimation.m | Code to estimate the parameters of the model | Matlab |
2. Optimal Healthy/Economics Policies for Human Mobility to Control Epidemic Spread
Abstract: The goal of the heath-mobility project, is to design optimal control policies to regulate dedicated human mobility from residential areas to other locations of a city during the deceleration interval of an epidemic. In this interval, people are usually allowed to go back to their normal routine after quarantine. We target control policies that will not only minimize the social and economic costs incurred by the restricted mobility but also minimize the possibility of resurgence subsequent waves of the epidemic.
Status: Work in progress.
Publications:
Data:
* Partial support for this project comes from Inria, France, in the framework of the COVID-19 fast-track research program.