Dynamical Network Design for Controlling Virus Spread

This Demonstration illustrates the dynamical network design method developed in Y. Wan, S. Roy, and A. Saberi, "A New Focus in the Science of Networks: Towards Methods for Design," Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 464(2091), 2008 pp. 513–535. In particular, the performance of a design for stopping virus spread is demonstrated.

Recently, problems of network management and design have become more and more important in such diverse areas as air traffic flow management and virus-spread control. Several problems of interest can be abstracted to the problems of allocating resources to a network based on its graph topology, so as to optimize its dynamic performance. The referenced article shows how available local resources can be optimally allocated to different nodes or parts in the network, using matrix analysis methods. Please see www.eecs.wsu.edu/~ywan for much more on network design and control.

As an example, epidemic control can be viewed as reducing the average number of secondary infections produced during an infected individual's infectious period. The spatially inhomogeneous dynamics for epidemic spread in a population network are often represented using a class of models known as multi-group models. Using the multi-group model, the authors have posed and solved the problem of inhomogeneously allocating local resources to minimize spread (i.e., secondary infection population). Conceptually, the method yields that more control resources should be placed in the highly connected parts of the network, and fewer in isolated parts. In the Demonstration, regions receiving the most resources have the symbol "*" next to their names. In this way, the virus's spread can be stopped quickly and so the virus will quickly die off.