Optimal Control of Urban Human Mobility for Epidemic Mitigation

Controlling human mobility during an epidemic is a fundamental issue faced by policymakers. Such control can only be done optimally if human mobility is adequately modeled at the scale of a city or metropolis. This paper, first, develops a model of human mobility that captures the daily patterns of mobility in an urban environment through time-dependent gating functions, which are controlled by the destination schedules and mobility windows. The process of epidemic spread is incorporated at each location that depends on the number of susceptible and infected people present at that location. Then, two optimal control policies are proposed to maximize the economic activity at the destinations while mitigating the epidemic. Precisely, operating capacities and time schedules of destinations are controlled to maximize the economic activity under the constraint that the number of active infected cases remains bounded.