Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 10: Focus Session: Complex Contagion Phenmomena (joint session SOE / DY / BP)

SOE 10.5: Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 11:30–11:45, MA 001

The good, the bad and the optimal: allocation of resources during emergent infectious diseases — •Olga Baranov¹ and Dirk Brockmann^1,2 — ¹Robert Koch Institut, Berlin — ²HU Berlin

The growing complexity of global mobility is a key challenge for the understanding of the worldwide spread of emergent infectious diseases and the design of effective containment strategies. Despite global connectivity, containment policies are based on national, regional and 'egocentric' assessments of outbreak situations that are no longer effective or meaningful in the development of efficient containment strategies. This was recently demonstrated by 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa where months passed before a concerted effort followed. Despite the importance of the matter, optimal strategies are poorly understood. We investigate a model for the optimal deployment of mitigation resources in a network of interacting countries. Each node can exercise a limited amount of resources among all nodes in the network to mitigate an outbreak. At each node costs are a combination of invested resources and effective susceptibility to import a disease. We treat the problem game theoretically and show that, contrary to common belief, purely selfish and cooperative actions do not differ considerably in a single outbreak scenario. Purely selfish behavior tends to invest resources at the outbreak location. However, in a scenario with multiple outbreak locations we find that resource allocation can follow more complex patterns and nodes can fall back on egocentric resource allocations. We will report on preliminary results obtained for a system when disease dynamics and resource allocation are modelled explicitly.