Preface to Special Issue on Dynamic Games for Modeling and Control of Epidemics

Abstract

This preface introduces the special issue on Dynamic Games for Modeling and Control of Epidemics. It showcases 12 papers with timely contributions to dynamic games and their applications to the modeling, analysis, and control of epidemics. The papers in this collection connect dynamic games and epidemic models to address the recent challenges related to screening, containment, and mitigation strategies for epidemics. This collection covers broad application areas in networks, human behaviors, and epidemiology as well as a diverse range of dynamic game methods, including evolutionary games, differential games, and mean-field games.The recent COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant social and economic disruption in today's connected world. There is an imminent need to understand and control the spreading of the disease over networks. Dynamic games provide a natural framework to model and analyze the individual incentives and their social interactions over large networks. Sophisticated models such as evolutionary games [9,15] and mean-field games [3,13] have enabled the understanding of the emerging population-level phenomena and effective control mechanisms. Connecting dynamic games and epidemic models offers a scientific foundation for rigorous and quantitative analysis and design of screening, containment, and mitigation strategies for large-scale dynamic and network systems. This cross-disciplinary approach will not only address the current challenges with COVID-19 but also shed light on related This article is part of the topical collection "Modeling and Control of Epidemics" edited by Quanyan Zhu,