Epidemics and their implications in urban environments: A case study on a national scope

Abstract

In times where urbanization becomes more important every day, epidemic outbreaks may be devastating. Powerful forecasting and analysis tools are of high importance for both, small and large scale examinations. Such tools provide valuable insight on different levels and help to establish and improve embankment mechanisms. Here, we present an agent-based algorithmic framework to simulate the spread of epidemic diseases on a national scope. Based on the population structure of Germany, we investigate parameters such as the impact of the number of agents, representing the population, on the quality of the simulation and evaluate them using real world data provided by the Robert Koch Institute [4, 22]. Furthermore, we empirically analyze the effects of certain non-pharmaceutical countermeasures as applied in the USA against the Influenza Pandemic in 1918-1919 [18]. Our simulation and evaluation tool partially relies on the probabilistic movement model presented in [8]. Our empirical tests show that the amount of agents in use may be crucial. Depending on the existing knowledge about the considered epidemic, this parameter alone may have a huge impact on the accuracy of the achieved simulation results. However, with the right choice of parameters- some of them being obtained from real world observations [10]-one can efficiently approximate the course of a disease in real world.