Optimal control prevents itself from eradicating stochastic disease epidemics
Fig 5
Results summary for the 2x2 challenging system. Equivalent to Fig 4.
When eradication is not feasible, MPC and optimal control both outperform the priority based controllers (although by a smaller margin). Again, the way in which the subpopulations are prioritised for the priority based controllers appears to be unimportant. The example disease progress curves for the overall system show that both optimal control and priority based controls are using all the available control resource until close to the end of the outbreak. The violin plot of rewards (a) is shown excluding the small number of high scoring cases (reward = 8,000 to 10,000). Each row is a summary of 100 simulations and N is the number of datapoints displayed within the range of the plot.