Optimal Control Policies and Strategies for Critical Situations
How can we make better decisions in critical situations like during the corona pandemic? We optimize the strategies given two policies for the current pandemic situation. We simply take the SIER model, extend it by adding economical models besides the health issues. We study just two simple policies "Lock down" and "Social distancing" and try to optimize their trigger time (when we start applying them). Since the economy and health can (or in this case "are") conflicting objectives, we identify the Pareto-Optimal strategies. In our simple case, a strategy is simply the start point of applying these policies:
The above figure shows the two variables t1 and t2 as the start time of the two policies and the figure below shows their impact on health and economy in the HED model.
The points A, B, C, D and E are different strategies and we study three of them below.
The above figures show the stratgies A, E and C respectively. More information can be found in our recent paper in our blog post: here