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An Exploratory Study on the Simulation of Stochastic Epidemic Models

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Trends and Innovations in Information Systems and Technologies (WorldCIST 2020)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1159))

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Abstract

A small number of people infected with a contagious disease in a large community can lead to the rapid spread of the disease by many of the people in that community, leading to an epidemic. Mathematical models of epidemics allow estimating several impacts on the population, such as the total and maximum number of people infected, as well as the duration and the moment of greatest impact of the epidemic. This information is of great use for the definition of public health policies.

This work is concerned with the simulation of the spread of infectious diseases in small to medium communities by applying the Monte Carlo method to a Susceptibles-Infectives-Recovered (SIR) stochastic epidemic model. To minimize the computational effort involved, a simple parallelization approach was adopted and deployed in a small HPC cluster.

The simulations conducted show that an epidemic outbreak can occur even if the initial number of infected people is small, and that this probability decreases significantly with the vaccination of a population subset.

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Acknowledgement

UNIAG, R&D unit funded by the FCT – Portuguese Foundation for the Development of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education. Project n.\(^{\circ }\) UIDB/04752/2020.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics (CeDRI), Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253, Bragança, Portugal

    Carlos Balsa & José Rufino

  2. Applied Management Research Unit (UNIAG), Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253, Bragança, Portugal

    Isabel Lopes

  3. Centro ALGORITMI, Escola de Engenharia - Universidade do Minho, Campus Azurém, 4800-058, Guimarães, Portugal

    Isabel Lopes & Teresa Guarda

  4. Universidad Estatal Península de Santa Elena – UPSE, La Libertad, Ecuador

    Teresa Guarda

  5. Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas-ESPE, Sangolqui, Quito, Ecuador

    Teresa Guarda

Authors
  1. Carlos Balsa
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  2. Isabel Lopes
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  3. José Rufino
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  4. Teresa Guarda
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Isabel Lopes .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Álvaro Rocha

  2. College of Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Hojjat Adeli

  3. FEUP, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Luís Paulo Reis

  4. DIMES, Università della Calabria, Arcavacata, Italy

    Sandra Costanzo

  5. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Montenegro, Podgorica, Montenegro

    Irena Orovic

  6. Universidade Portucalense, Porto, Portugal

    Fernando Moreira

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© 2020 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Balsa, C., Lopes, I., Rufino, J., Guarda, T. (2020). An Exploratory Study on the Simulation of Stochastic Epidemic Models. In: Rocha, Á., Adeli, H., Reis, L., Costanzo, S., Orovic, I., Moreira, F. (eds) Trends and Innovations in Information Systems and Technologies. WorldCIST 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1159. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45688-7_71

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