On the Use of MPC Techniques to Decide Intervention Policies against COVID-19

This paper aims at demonstrating how and that model predictive control (MPC) strategies can be used to determine optimal intervention policies against the COVID-19 pandemic. Especially for the time after a first wave of infection and before a vaccine can be safely distributed to a sufficient extent, the intervention experience from the first outbreak can be utilized to guide the policy decision in this period. The MPC problem in this paper takes the pandemic in different regions of a country and its neighboring countries into account, while policies such as wearing masks or social distancing are selected as inputs to be optimized. This optimized policy balances the risk of a second outbreak and socio-economic costs, while considering that the measure should not be too severe to be rejected by the population. Effectiveness of this policy compared to standard intervention policies is compared through numerical simulations.