Optimal intervention policies for a multidimensional simple epidemic process

We consider a deterministic simple epidemic process in which the susceptibles are exposed to n + 1 diseases. It is assumed that one disease is relatively harmless while the others cause serious symptoms. Policies for introducing infection by the harmless disease are considered and, under a suitable cost structure, the optimal policy that minimises the future cost for every initial state is found. For the corresponding stochastic model, the optimal policy is found by implementing a suitable dynamic programming algorithm, and is compared numerically with the optimal policy for the deterministic model.