The Effect of Media in Mitigating Epidemic Outbreaks: The Sliding Mode Control Approach

Ever since the World Health Organization gave the name COVID-19 to the coronavirus pneumonia disease, much of the world has been severely impact by the pandemic socially and economically. In this paper, the mathematical modeling and stability analyses in terms of the susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (SEIR) model with a nonlinear incidence rate, along with media interaction effects, are presented. The sliding mode control methodology is used to design a robust closed loop control of the epidemiological system, where the property of symmetry in the Lyapunov function plays a vital role in achieving the global asymptotic stability in the output. Two policies are considered: the first considers only the governmental interaction, the second considers only the vaccination policy. Numerical simulations of the control algorithms are then evaluated.

Automated summary

This paper presents mathematical modeling and stability analyses based on the SEIR model with a nonlinear incidence rate to describe the COVID-19 pandemic, considering media interactions and control strategies. The sliding mode control methodology is used to design a robust closed loop control system for the epidemiological model, and numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate the control algorithms.