Ricerc@Sapienza

Globalization has, among others, the effect of facilitating the rapid spread of an epidemic disease in all the regions of the earth.
In the last years, the dynamics of the spread of various kinds of epidemic diseases have been largely studied, in order to have a good model that can help to forecast the modalities of the geographic diffusion among nations with different social characteristics and healthy weakness, in view of prevention and therapeutic actions. These modalities depend on the dangerousness of the epidemic and/or on the general health of the population, on social habits and so on. When an epidemic affects one group in a region, it modifies the peculiarities of that group and therefore the corresponding epidemic model must be changed; in the meantime, the spread could start and involve subjects in other regions, thus resulting in a new global environmental and social situation.
In this project, the epidemic spread is faced considering a two-levels modeling; one level takes into account ¿in-regions¿ dynamics, whereas the other level considers ¿intra-regions¿ interactions. The awareness of the presence of a virus changes the interactions between the different elements of each region and, consequently, among all the regions, thus inducing a different scenario to be faced with suitable control strategies.
The main goals of this project are:
1. to propose a general mathematical description of a multilayer society epidemic spread over a geographical network;
2. to propose, in such a complex dynamical scenario, control strategies for optimal resource allocation, with and without the constraint of resource limitations;
3. to validate the approach referring to a study case, putting in evidence the effectiveness of the optimal control action.

As the references included confirm, the proposers of this project have experience in modeling and control the spread of different epidemics (SIR, influenza SIRC, HIV/AIDS).