EpiMoRPH: A simulation environment for generating spatially-refined intervention strategies for the control of infectious disease

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Project Summary The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted that mathematical modeling of infectious disease is critical for data-informed decision making. At the same time, however, it has been made clear that the modeling community does not have appropriately advanced informatics infrastructures that facilitate a rapid consensus understanding during epidemics and that put the power of modeling in the hands of local public health stakeholders. This project proposes three integrated elements to transform the workflow of constructing, testing, and crowd-sourcing spatial epidemiological models to gain deep understanding of epidemics, to provide usable decision-making tools for local stakeholders, and to propose concrete, locally focused solutions. Our proposal is to develop a proof-of-concept, collaborative informatics framework for model construction, analysis and comparison, followed by rigorous optimization of spatial intervention strategies. In Aim 1, we design EpiMoRPH (Epidemiological Modeling Resources for Public Health), a system that will streamline and automate the construction and testing of spatial models against benchmark data. EpiMoRPH will support rapid model comparisons in a community-driven environment to build consensus and to produce a broad understanding of which modeling approaches are most appropriate in different spatial contexts. Importantly, EpiMoRPH will assist local public health stakeholders with deciding on the best, community-contributed models that are relevant for their particular situations and will then implement those best models to make locally customized forecasts. In Aim 2, we make advances in the automation of spatial and robust optimization algorithms, with the goal of allowing non-expert users to generate tailor-made intervention strategies relevant to their local municipalities. Here, we will develop a tool kit of robust optimization algorithms that account for various uncertainties and that will gradually build upon the functionality of EpiMoRPH. Importantly, a driving motivation for this tool kit is to ensure that the optimization routines allow public health stakeholders to balance the control of transmission and disease outcomes with the equitable allocation of interventions across racial, ethnic, and socio-economic sectors. In Aim 3, we will collaborate with a Public Health Advisory Council to test, formally evaluate, and refine our model-based technologies, ensuring that our innovations meet the needs of public health partners, while also appealing to the broader community of epidemiological modelers. Together our aims will build accessible and sustainable technologies that put epidemiological modeling and optimization methods in the hands of local public health decision-makers.