Intervention for contagious disease: Agent-based modeling and simulation

Many kinds of countermeaseure could be adopted to contain or mitigate the spread of contagious disease; however, their effects are not very clear. We developed an agent-based model for assessment of those intervention policies. The population in a community was model as a large-scale artificial society, which is consistent with survey data in statistical characteristic. This artificial society is composed of numbers of households, schools, workplaces and social places. All those places, exclude households, are further divided into mixing groups. Individual schedules his/her daily behavior, travels to other places, contacts with others, and may result to transmission of disease. Contacts among individuals construct the dynamic network in the fly. Control policies change the behavior of individuals, and may lead to mitigation of disease. We developed agent-based simulation software, and validated the model with sample runs. The results show that this model may be helpful in exploring the effects of countermeasure for infectious disease in large-scale population.