In this letter, we describe some of the most important objectives and needs in pandemic control. We identify the main open problems in the different stages of the decision making process, as well as the most significant challenges to overcome them, leading to promising future research directions. We provide a concise review of the most recent literature describing such challenges, highlighting the main results, achievements and methodologies that can be employed to address them. In particular, we discuss some promising recent techniques that have been successfully applied to the Covid-19 pandemic and could be very valuable in the design of novel methodologies to face future pandemics.

This survey analyses the role of data-driven methodologies for pandemic modelling and control. We provide a roadmap from the access to epidemiological data sources to the control of epidemic phenomena. We review the available methodologies and discuss the challenges in the development of data-driven strategies to combat the spreading of infectious diseases. Our aim is to bring together several different disciplines required to provide a holistic approach to epidemic analysis, such as data science, epidemiology, and systems-and-control theory. A 3M-analysis is presented, whose three pillars are: Monitoring, Modelling and Managing. The focus is on the potential of data-driven schemes to address three different challenges raised by a pandemic: (i) monitoring the epidemic evolution and assessing the effectiveness of the adopted countermeasures; (ii) modelling and forecasting the spread of the epidemic; (iii) making timely decisions to manage, mitigate and suppress the contagion. For each step of this roadmap, we review consolidated theoretical approaches (including data-driven methodologies that have been shown to be successful in other contexts) and discuss their application to past or present epidemics, such as Covid-19, as well as their potential application to future epidemics.

In this article, we study the target controllability problem of networked dynamical systems,in which we are tasked to steer a subset of network nodes toward a desired objective. More specifically, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the structural target controllability of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with symmetric state matrices, such as those representing undirected dynamical networks with unknown link weights. To achieve our goal, we first characterize the generic rank of symmetrically structured matrices, as well as the modes of any numerical realization. Subsequently, we provide graph-theoretic necessary and sufficient conditions for the structural target controllability of undirected networks with multiple control nodes. In addition, we show that these results can be extended and lead to a necessary and sufficient condition of the structural output controllability. However, different from structural target controllability, we prove that verifying the proposed conditions on structural output controllability in undirected networks is NP-hard.