Complex environment representation in epidemiology ABM: application on H5N1 propagation

Abstract

Agent-based  models  (ABM)  are  becoming  standard  tools  to  study  complex  systems especially in ecology and more recently in epidemiology. The developments of models in these domains have highlighted the need for more complex representations of the environment. In this paper, we present an individual-based epidemiological model that has the particularity to make heavy  use  of  geographic  data  and  complex  spatial  operations.  From  this  example,  we  review several  popular  ABM  simulation  platforms.  These  platforms  do  not  answer  such  model’s requirements  in  a  whole.  In  order  to  answer  this  problem,  we  propose  a  new  approach  to represent the environment in ABM. This approach along numerous spatial operations tools has been implemented in the GAMA simulation platform, which is described in this paper.