From insight to action: Optimal control for epidemic management and treatment design

A deeper understanding of the structure and functioning of a natural system is instrumental for designing targeted interventions aimed at steering its dynamics and contrasting undesired emergent behaviours. In particular, optimal control provides a systematic framework to design such interventions in the life sciences, epidemiology and medicine. This seminar discusses optimal control strategies tailored to different fundamental challenges.
First, we discuss optimal non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions to control the spread of infectious diseases in a population, based on epidemic models including an arbitrary number of infected and non-infected compartments as well as the effect of social distancing and vaccination, also in the presence of delays; we explore efficient numerical approaches based on sequential algorithms such as the Sakawa-Shindo and the Sequential Quadratic Hamiltonian methods.
Then, we consider optimal treatment design and we present optimal control approaches to mitigate the emergence and proliferation of antimicrobial resistance and to design optimal therapeutic plans for infectious diseases and cancer, including strategies involving switching between multiple drugs.

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