DIMACS Computational and Mathematical Epidemiology Seminar Series

Title: An example of a disease outbreak simulation in an urban environment: TRANSIMS and EpiSims.

Speaker: Tanya Berger-Wolf, DIMACS Postdoc

Date: November 1, 2004 11:30 - 12:50

Location: DIMACS Center, CoRE Bldg, Room 433, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ

Abstract:

We will describe TRansportation ANalysis SIMulation System (TRANSIMS) and EpiSims, developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the last 8 years. TRANSIMS is an agent-based simulation system capable of simulating second-by-second movements of every person and every vehicle through the transportation network of a large metropolitan area. EpiSims is a disease simulations system. It includes a general within-host progression as well as between-host transmission models. We will discuss various structural parameters of the social networks produced by TRANSIMS that are relevant to epidemiology and present an example of a disease outbreak (smallpox) in such a network. The talk is based on the following publications:

• 1. S. Eubank, H. Guclu, V.S.A. Kumar, M.V. Marathe, A. Srinivasan, Z. Toroczkai, N. Wang, and The EpiSims Team, "Modelling disease outbreaks in realistic urban social networks", Nature, 429:180--184, 2004.
• 2. S. Eubank, V.S.A. Kumar, M. Marathe, A. Srinivasan, and N. Wang. "Structural and algorithmic aspects of massive social networks", Proc. of the 15th SIAM-ACM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SOAD), pp.711-720, 2004.
• 3. S. Eubank and J. Smith. "Scalable, efficient epidemiological simulation", Proc. of Symposium on Applied Computing, 2002.