Category: Epidemiology

Summary: Testing whether adaptive vaccination-trigger pulses outperform fixed pulses when seasonal epidemic waves are phase-shifted across a weakly coupled metapopulation.

Real epidemics rarely peak everywhere at once: neighboring communities can experience similar seasons but with phase offsets, creating a moving target for intervention. This experiment asks whether adaptive vaccination triggers can exploit that phase-jittered structure better than fixed pulses, and whether the benefit is strongest at intermediate mobility coupling between communities.

The simulation runs epidemic dynamics on a metapopulation with seasonal forcing, compares adaptive and fixed trigger policies across coupling strengths, and records attack rates, trigger counts, and which coupling regime gives the adaptive policy its largest advantage. The focus is on timing mismatches between local peaks rather than on homogeneous synchronized outbreaks.

That makes the project a control problem in a spatially structured epidemic setting. The value lies in identifying whether moderate coupling creates enough information flow to help adaptive interventions without fully synchronizing away the advantage of local timing differences.

Method: Metapopulation epidemic simulations with phase-jittered seasonal forcing, comparing adaptive versus fixed vaccination-trigger pulses across mobility couplings.

What is measured: Attack rate, trigger count, adaptive-minus-fixed attack reduction, best coupling for adaptive control, and whether the adaptive optimum lies at intermediate coupling.