Evaluating the mitigation strategies of COVID-19 by the application of the CO2 emission data through high-resolution agent-based computational experiments

Abstract

The negative consequences, such as healthy and environmental issues, brought by rapid urbanization and interactive human activities result in increasing social uncertainties, unreliable predictions, and poor management decisions. For instance, the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) occurred in 2019 has been plaguing many countries. Aiming at controlling the spread of COVID-19, countries around the world have adopted various mitigation and suppression strategies. However, how to comprehensively eva luate different mitigation strategies remains unexplored. To this end, based on the Artificial societies, Computational experiments, Parallel execution (ACP) approach, we proposed a system model, which clarifies the process to collect the necessary data and conduct large-scale computational experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies. Specifically, we established an artificial society of Wuhan city through geo-environment modeling, population modeling, contact behavior modeling, disease spread modeling and mitigation strategy modeling. Moreover, we established an evaluation model in terms of the control effects and economic costs of the mitigation strategy. With respect to the control effects, it is directly reflected by indicators such as the cumulative number of diseases and deaths, while the relationship between mitigation strategies and economic costs is built based on the emission. Finally, large-scale simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the mitigation strategies of six countries. The results reveal that the more strict mitigation strategies achieve better control effects and less economic costs.

Strategy evaluation and optimization with an artificial society toward a Pareto optimum

“…The dynamic feature of the artificial society allows a more realistic analysis of an epidemic as well as a more informative evaluation of intervention strategies. 5 For instance, the artificial society can give information on the diagnosis of an individual (and their activity trajectory), the infection situation at a school or workplace, or the situation of an outbreak in a city.…”