scholarly journals Prediction of Covid-19 spreading and optimal coordination of counter-measures: From microscopic to macroscopic models to Pareto fronts

Author(s):  
Hanna Wulkow ◽  
Tim Conrad ◽  
Nataša Djurdjevac Conrad ◽  
Sebastian A. Mueller ◽  
Kai Nagel ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Covid-19 disease has caused a world-wide pandemic with more than 60 million positive cases and more than 1.4 million deaths by the end of November 2020. As long as effective medical treatment and vaccination are not available, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, self-isolation and quarantine as well as far-reaching shutdowns of economic activity and public life are the only available strategies to prevent the virus from spreading. These interventions must meet conflicting requirements where some objectives, like the minimization of disease-related deaths or the impact on health systems, demand for stronger counter-measures, while others, such as social and economic costs, call for weaker counter-measures. Therefore, finding the optimal compromise of counter-measures requires the solution of a multi-objective optimization problem that is based on accurate prediction of future infection spreading for all combinations of counter-measures under consideration. We present a strategy for construction and solution of such a multi-objective optimization problem with real-world applicability. The strategy is based on a micro-model allowing for accurate prediction via a realistic combination of person-centric data-driven human mobility and behavior, stochastic infection models and disease progression models including micro-level inclusion of governmental intervention strategies. For this micro-model, a surrogate macro-model is constructed and validated that is much less computationally expensive and can therefore be used in the core of a numerical solver for the multi-objective optimization problem. The resulting set of optimal compromises between counter-measures (Pareto front) is discussed and its meaning for policy decisions is outlined.

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0249676
Author(s):  
Hanna Wulkow ◽  
Tim O. F. Conrad ◽  
Nataša Djurdjevac Conrad ◽  
Sebastian A. Müller ◽  
Kai Nagel ◽  
...  

The Covid-19 disease has caused a world-wide pandemic with more than 60 million positive cases and more than 1.4 million deaths by the end of November 2020. As long as effective medical treatment and vaccination are not available, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, self-isolation and quarantine as well as far-reaching shutdowns of economic activity and public life are the only available strategies to prevent the virus from spreading. These interventions must meet conflicting requirements where some objectives, like the minimization of disease-related deaths or the impact on health systems, demand for stronger counter-measures, while others, such as social and economic costs, call for weaker counter-measures. Therefore, finding the optimal compromise of counter-measures requires the solution of a multi-objective optimization problem that is based on accurate prediction of future infection spreading for all combinations of counter-measures under consideration. We present a strategy for construction and solution of such a multi-objective optimization problem with real-world applicability. The strategy is based on a micro-model allowing for accurate prediction via a realistic combination of person-centric data-driven human mobility and behavior, stochastic infection models and disease progression models including micro-level inclusion of governmental intervention strategies. For this micro-model, a surrogate macro-model is constructed and validated that is much less computationally expensive and can therefore be used in the core of a numerical solver for the multi-objective optimization problem. The resulting set of optimal compromises between counter-measures (Pareto front) is discussed and its meaning for policy decisions is outlined.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2775
Author(s):  
Tsubasa Takano ◽  
Takumi Nakane ◽  
Takuya Akashi ◽  
Chao Zhang

In this paper, we propose a method to detect Braille blocks from an egocentric viewpoint, which is a key part of many walking support devices for visually impaired people. Our main contribution is to cast this task as a multi-objective optimization problem and exploits both the geometric and the appearance features for detection. Specifically, two objective functions were designed under an evolutionary optimization framework with a line pair modeled as an individual (i.e., solution). Both of the objectives follow the basic characteristics of the Braille blocks, which aim to clarify the boundaries and estimate the likelihood of the Braille block surface. Our proposed method was assessed by an originally collected and annotated dataset under real scenarios. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that the proposed method can detect Braille blocks under various environments. We also provide a comprehensive comparison of the detection performance with respect to different multi-objective optimization algorithms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Hailin Liu ◽  
Fangqing Gu ◽  
Zixian Lin

Transfer learning methods exploit similarities between different datasets to improve the performance of the target task by transferring knowledge from source tasks to the target task. “What to transfer” is a main research issue in transfer learning. The existing transfer learning method generally needs to acquire the shared parameters by integrating human knowledge. However, in many real applications, an understanding of which parameters can be shared is unknown beforehand. Transfer learning model is essentially a special multi-objective optimization problem. Consequently, this paper proposes a novel auto-sharing parameter technique for transfer learning based on multi-objective optimization and solves the optimization problem by using a multi-swarm particle swarm optimizer. Each task objective is simultaneously optimized by a sub-swarm. The current best particle from the sub-swarm of the target task is used to guide the search of particles of the source tasks and vice versa. The target task and source task are jointly solved by sharing the information of the best particle, which works as an inductive bias. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed algorithm on several synthetic data sets and two real-world data sets of a school data set and a landmine data set, which show that the proposed algorithm is effective.


Author(s):  
Weijun Wang ◽  
Stéphane Caro ◽  
Fouad Bennis ◽  
Oscar Brito Augusto

For Multi-Objective Robust Optimization Problem (MOROP), it is important to obtain design solutions that are both optimal and robust. To find these solutions, usually, the designer need to set a threshold of the variation of Performance Functions (PFs) before optimization, or add the effects of uncertainties on the original PFs to generate a new Pareto robust front. In this paper, we divide a MOROP into two Multi-Objective Optimization Problems (MOOPs). One is the original MOOP, another one is that we take the Robustness Functions (RFs), robust counterparts of the original PFs, as optimization objectives. After solving these two MOOPs separately, two sets of solutions come out, namely the Pareto Performance Solutions (PP) and the Pareto Robustness Solutions (PR). Make a further development on these two sets, we can get two types of solutions, namely the Pareto Robustness Solutions among the Pareto Performance Solutions (PR(PP)), and the Pareto Performance Solutions among the Pareto Robustness Solutions (PP(PR)). Further more, the intersection of PR(PP) and PP(PR) can represent the intersection of PR and PP well. Then the designer can choose good solutions by comparing the results of PR(PP) and PP(PR). Thanks to this method, we can find out the optimal and robust solutions without setting the threshold of the variation of PFs nor losing the initial Pareto front. Finally, an illustrative example highlights the contributions of the paper.


2014 ◽  
Vol 494-495 ◽  
pp. 1715-1718
Author(s):  
Gui Li Yuan ◽  
Tong Yu ◽  
Juan Du

The classic multi-objective optimization method of sub goals multiplication and division theory is applied to solve optimal load distribution problem in thermal power plants. A multi-objective optimization model is built which comprehensively reflects the economy, environmental protection and speediness. The proposed model effectively avoids the target normalization and weights determination existing in the process of changing the multi-objective optimization problem into a single objective optimization problem. Since genetic algorithm (GA) has the drawback of falling into local optimum, adaptive immune vaccines algorithm (AIVA) is applied to optimize the constructed model and the results are compared with that optimized by genetic algorithm. Simulation shows this method can complete multi-objective optimal load distribution quickly and efficiently.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 699
Author(s):  
Daniele Peri

In this paper, some methodologies aimed at the identification of the Pareto front of a multi-objective optimization problem are presented and applied. Three different approaches are presented: local sampling, Pareto front resampling and Normal Boundary Intersection (NBI). A first approximation of the Pareto front is obtained by a regular sampling of the design space, and then the Pareto front is improved and enriched using the other two above mentioned techniques. A detailed Pareto front is obtained for an optimization problem where algebraic objective functions are applied, also in comparison with standard techniques. Encouraging results are also obtained for two different ship design problems. The use of the algebraic functions allows for a comparison with the real Pareto front, correctly detected. The variety of the ship design problems allows for a generalization of the applicability of the methodology.


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