Epidemic spreading on weighted adaptive networks

Considering the fact that the contact strengths among people are diverse both in the duration time and the distance, in this paper, we study the epidemic dynamics with susceptible–infective–susceptible (SIS) model on a weighted adaptive network to emphasize this contact feature. In this model, the weight of a link denotes the contact strength between two individuals connected by this link, and each susceptible individual may adaptively transfer the weight from a link to another. We find that this weight adaption process could significantly aggravate the prevalence of an epidemic. Moreover, we examine the effectiveness of the link-removal strategy with our model, and the results show that the weight adaption process may weaken the efficiency of the strategy. The theoretical analysis is supported by the simulation results.