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Preventing and slowing the spread of epidemics is achieved through techniques such as vaccination and social distancing. Given practical limitations on the number of vaccines and cost of administration, optimization becomes a necessity. Previous approaches using mathematical programming methods have shown to be effective but are limited by computational costs. In this work, we present PREEMPT, a new approach for intervention via maximizing the influence of vaccinated nodes on the network.We prove submodular properties associated with the objective function of our method so that it aids in construction of an efficient greedy approximation strategy. Consequently, we present a new parallel algorithm based on greedy hill climbing for PREEMPT, and present an efficient parallel implementation for distributed CPU-GPU heterogeneous platforms. Our results demonstrate that PREEMPT is able to achieve a significant reduction (up to 6:75) in the percentage of people infected and up to 98% reduction in the peak of the infection on a cityscale network. We also show strong scaling results of PREEMPT on up to 128 nodes of the Summit supercomputer. Our parallel implementation is able to significantly reduce time to solution, from hours to minutes on large networks. This work represents a first-of-its-kind effort in parallelizing greedy hill climbing and applying it toward devising effective interventions for epidemics.
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Agent-Based Computational Epidemiological Modeling
The study of epidemics is useful for not only understanding outbreaks and trying to limit their adverse effects, but also because epidemics are related to social phenomena such as government instability, crime, poverty, and inequality. One approach for studying epidemics is to simulate their spread through populations. In this work, we describe an integrated multi-dimensional approach to epidemic simulation, which encompasses: (i) a theoretical framework for simulation and analysis; (ii) synthetic population (digital twin) generation; (iii) (social contact) network construction methods from synthetic populations, (iv) stylized network construction methods; and (v) simulation of the evolution of a virus or disease through a social network. We describe these aspects and end with a short discussion on simulation results that inform public policy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1916670
- PAR ID:
- 10310251
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the Indian Institute of Science
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s41745-021-00260-2
