Deep Reinforcement Learning for Digital Twin-Oriented Complex Networked Systems
This work addresses epidemic management for public health by extending a digital twin framework, though it is incremental as it builds on previous evolutionary models.
The study tackled epidemic resilience in digital twin-oriented complex networked systems by modeling temporal interactions with reinforcement learning, finding that full cooperation yields higher rewards and lower infection numbers compared to scenarios with egocentric or ignorant free-riders.
The Digital Twin Oriented Complex Networked System (DT-CNS) aims to build and extend a Complex Networked System (CNS) model with progressively increasing dynamics complexity towards an accurate reflection of reality -- a Digital Twin of reality. Our previous work proposed evolutionary DT-CNSs to model the long-term adaptive network changes in an epidemic outbreak. This study extends this framework by proposeing the temporal DT-CNS model, where reinforcement learning-driven nodes make decisions on temporal directed interactions in an epidemic outbreak. We consider cooperative nodes, as well as egocentric and ignorant "free-riders" in the cooperation. We describe this epidemic spreading process with the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered ($SIR$) model and investigate the impact of epidemic severity on the epidemic resilience for different types of nodes. Our experimental results show that (i) the full cooperation leads to a higher reward and lower infection number than a cooperation with egocentric or ignorant "free-riders"; (ii) an increasing number of "free-riders" in a cooperation leads to a smaller reward, while an increasing number of egocentric "free-riders" further escalate the infection numbers and (iii) higher infection rates and a slower recovery weakens networks' resilience to severe epidemic outbreaks. These findings also indicate that promoting cooperation and reducing "free-riders" can improve public health during epidemics.