Flexible mitigation of epidemics by transport management

In recent years, the global spread of novel infectious diseases has become a significant concern at all levels of the society. The existence of a capillary transport network that facilitates the transmission of the diseases is a particular factor whose relevance cannot be underestimated. In fact, to try to slow down the spread of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, many governments adopted control measures that directly included travel restrictions. These measures, while undoubtedly effective, also had deleterious political and societal effects. In this article, we introduce an event-trigger mechanism in the decision-making framework for the mitigation of epidemics via transport management. Using our approach, we demonstrate that one can develop restriction policies in a controlled manner, so that the economic side effects remain tolerable. When applied to the COVID-19 pandemic data in Germany, our method shows better performance than the measures that were actually implemented. • An epidemic mitigation model that tunes traffic flow between geographical regions rather than imposing hard lockdowns. • The model is flexible and it uses control to maximize the mitigation while minimizing economic and social side effects. • The framework includes a triggering condition, so that mitigation policies are considered only when needed, easing their implementation.