OPENNESS: “OPtimal bEhavior iN paNdEmic ScenarioS”

OPENNESS is a research project founded under the POR FESR LAZIO 2014-2020 – GRUPPI DI RICERCA 2020 framework. It aims at investigating Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to govern “soft targets” (e.g., squares, theatres, subway stations, and commuting zones of urban areas) in pandemic scenarios. The project aims at providing a decision support system powered by AI techniques in order to help experts in the prevention and control of epidemic and pandemic diseases (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Specifically, the project supports the elicitation of the human-comprehensible behavioural rules that should be followed to reduce the spreading of an infectious disease within a given environment, or urban area. The behaviours to be adopted in “soft target” environments are first elicited by means of a reinforcement learning process on quantitative data obtained from simulative scenarios. Indeed, a scenario reproduces the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread in such environments. Thus, the learned behavioural rules are synthetized to be expressed in a set of explainable clauses comprehensible by human-beings. Verification and validation strategies are then applied on such logic representation of the behavioural rules in order to verify their correctness and validate their use within the decision making process.