Analysis and distributed control of periodic epidemic processes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes epidemic spread over periodic networks using the SIS model, providing stability conditions and designing a distributed control strategy to ensure the disease-free state is achieved.

Contribution

It introduces new spectral radius-based conditions for epidemic stability and develops a distributed control method for virus eradication.

Findings

Spectral radius conditions for exponential and asymptotic stability of the disease-free state.

Necessary and sufficient spectral conditions for convergence to disease-free equilibrium.

A distributed control strategy for epidemic eradication based on stability analysis.

Abstract

This paper studies epidemic processes over discrete-time periodic time-varying networks. We focus on the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model that accounts for a (possibly) mutating virus. We say that an agent is in the disease-free state if it is not infected by the virus. Our objective is to devise a control strategy which ensures that all agents in a network exponentially (resp. asymptotically) converge to the disease-free equilibrium (DFE). Towards this end, we first provide a) sufficient conditions for exponential (resp. asymptotic) convergence to the DFE; and b) a necessary and sufficient condition for asymptotic convergence to the DFE. The sufficient condition for global exponential stability (GES) (resp. global asymptotic stability (GAS)) of the DFE is in terms of the joint spectral radius of a set of suitably-defined matrices, whereas the necessary and sufficient condition for GAS of the DFE involves the spectral radius of an appropriately-defined product of matrices. Subsequently, we leverage the stability results in order to design a distributed control strategy for eradicating the epidemic.