Controlling contagious processes on temporal networks via adaptive rewiring

Abstract: We consider recurrent contagious processes on a time-varying network. As a control procedure to mitigate the epidemic, we propose an adaptive rewiring mechanism for temporary isolation of infected nodes upon their detection. As a case study, we investigate the network of pig trade in Germany. Based on extensive numerical simulations for a wide range of parameters, we demonstrate that the adaptation mechanism leads to a significant extension of the parameter range, for which most of the index nodes (origins of the epidemic) lead to vanishing epidemics. Furthermore the performance of adaptation is very heterogeneous with respect to the index node. We quantify the success of the proposed adaptation scheme in dependence on the infectious period and the detection time. To support our findings we propose a mean-field analytical description of the problem.