RunTheModel - Epidemic - Agent Based Model

Epidemic - Agent Based Model

This is an agent based model of spread of contagious disease. The problem statement:

*  We are considering a population of 10000 people. They live in the area 10 by 10 kilometers and are evenly spread around that area.
*  A person knows everybody who lives closer than 1 kilometer to him.
*  Initially 10 random people are sick and infectious, and everybody else is susceptible (none are immune).
*  If an infectious person contacts a susceptible person, the latter gets infected with the probability 0.1.
*  Having been infected, a person does not immediately become infectious. There is a latent period that lasts from 3 to 6 days.
    The people in the latent period are called exposed.
*  The illness duration after the latent period (i.e. the duration of the infectious phase) is uniformly distributed between 7 and 15 days.
*  During the infectious phase a person on average contacts 5 people he knows per day.
*  When the person recovers, he gets immune to the disease, but not forever. The immunity lasts from 2 to 3 months.

The output of the model is the number of infectious people over time.

The terminology and overall structure of that problem is taken from the compartmental models in epidemiology, namely from the
SEIR (Susceptible Exposed Infectious Recovered) model. SEIR problem is originally solved using differential equations; the approach
is the same as in system dynamics. We, however, are adding details that are not well captured by compartmental (aggregated) models:
space and communication dependent on space and uniformly distributed phase durations. The rationale behind using the agent
based approach is its naturalness: we may not know how to derive global equations for a particular disease, but we know the course
of the disease and can easily model it at individual level.

You can vary the parameters of the model on the fly and watch the disease dynamics.