TY - GEN
T1 - Covid-19 and Flattening the Curve
T2 - 2021 American Control Conference, ACC 2021
AU - Di Lauro, Francesco
AU - Kiss, Istvan Zoltan
AU - Rus, Daniela
AU - Santina, Cosimo Della
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Automatic Control Council.
PY - 2021/5/25
Y1 - 2021/5/25
N2 - Many of the policies that were put into place during the Covid-19 pandemic had a common goal: to flatten the curve of the number of infected people so that its peak remains under a critical threshold. This letter considers the challenge of engineering a strategy that enforces such a goal using control theory. We introduce a simple formulation of the optimal flattening problem, and provide a closed form solution. This is augmented through nonlinear closed loop tracking of the nominal solution, with the aim of ensuring close-to-optimal performance under uncertain conditions. A key contribution of this paper is to provide validation of the method with extensive and realistic simulations in a Covid-19 scenario, with particular focus on the case of Codogno - a small city in Northern Italy that has been among the most harshly hit by the pandemic.
AB - Many of the policies that were put into place during the Covid-19 pandemic had a common goal: to flatten the curve of the number of infected people so that its peak remains under a critical threshold. This letter considers the challenge of engineering a strategy that enforces such a goal using control theory. We introduce a simple formulation of the optimal flattening problem, and provide a closed form solution. This is augmented through nonlinear closed loop tracking of the nominal solution, with the aim of ensuring close-to-optimal performance under uncertain conditions. A key contribution of this paper is to provide validation of the method with extensive and realistic simulations in a Covid-19 scenario, with particular focus on the case of Codogno - a small city in Northern Italy that has been among the most harshly hit by the pandemic.
KW - Emerging control applications
KW - Large-scale systems
KW - Network analysis and control
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85111932333&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.23919/ACC50511.2021.9483375
DO - 10.23919/ACC50511.2021.9483375
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85111932333
T3 - Proceedings of the American Control Conference
SP - 3158
EP - 3163
BT - 2021 American Control Conference, ACC 2021
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 25 May 2021 through 28 May 2021
ER -