A Visual Analytics and Multi-Objective Optimisation Approach for Balancing Economic and Public Health Objectives through Compartmental Models

疾病传播的模型在应对新冠肺炎大流行方面继续发挥关键作用。有了有效疫苗的曙光，但要到2021年夏天才能广泛分发，重新接种疫苗可能是一项持续的要求。与此同时，需要混合解决方案来管理非药物干预(NPI)，这将最大限度地减少对我们日常生活的限制，同时抑制传播并保持我们医疗体系的完整性。可以公开使用真实的模型来预测病毒的传播。改变这些模型的参数可以用来表示试探性的政策行动，并在模型的模拟中推导出结果。通常，确定有效政策行动的主要目标是降低感染率。然而，往往有多个潜在冲突的目标需要并行优化。例如，我们可能想要减少医院占有率的政策，同时减少对经济的影响。我们的目标是提供一个通用的可视化分析框架，以探索复杂模型的参数空间以及目标之间的权衡，以便为政策制定者提供信息。具体地说：1.一种可扩展的可视化分析框架，用于对复杂划分模型的参数空间的可行区域进行参数空间探索，以便识别有效的政策行动。扩展这一框架以处理多个目标：减少对高危群体的传播、总病例和死亡、医院成本、断路器阈值和经济因素。

Modelling of disease spread continues to play a crucial role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. There is light at the end of the tunnel with effective vaccines, but it will take until the summer of 2021 for distribution to be widespread, and re-vaccination may be an ongoing requirement. In the meantime, hybrid solutions are required to manage non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), that minimise the restrictions to our daily lives while suppressing transmission and maintaining the integrity of our healthcare systems.Realistic models are publicly available to predict the spread of the virus. Varying the parameters of these models can be used to represent tentative policy actions, and the consequences are deduced in simulations of the model. Typically, the main objective for identifying effective policy actions has been to reduce the infection rate. However, often there are multiple, potentially conflicting, objectives that require optimisation in parallel. For instance, we may want policies that reduce the hospital occupancy, while simultaneouslyreducing economic impacts. Our goal is to provide a generic visual analytics framework to explore the parameter space of complex models as well as the trade-offs between objectives to inform policy makers. Specifically:1. A scalable visual analytics framework for parameter space exploration of feasible regions of the parameter space for complex compartmental models in order to identify effective policy actions.2. Extend this framework to handle multiple objectives: reduction of transmission to high risk groups, overall cases and deaths, hospital costs, thresholds for circuit breakers, and economic factors.