Nov. 20, 2009

Project Overview

Communicable diseases are major threats to public health and economy. Critical tools are in great demand to help answering important questions involving the spatio-temporal patterns of spread, such as

• their relevance to the transportation systems and implications to disruption to services and economic activities;
• their impact on the vulnerability of different populations; and
• their usefulness to develop public health policy decisions such as priority vaccinations or isolation and quarantine enforcement.

A key to these questions is geo-simulation tools for disease spread (GSTDS) that plausibly model and predict the dynamics of the disease spread across a large territory, taking into account the characteristics of the agent-host-environment interactions. The successful development of such a decision system and geo-simulation tools requires mathematical and environmental modeling of the behavior rules of the interacting individual hosts, high quality data obtained through a large scale surveillance, and faithful interpretation and analysis of the data.

In this project, we propose robust disease spread protocols by combining mathematical, vector network, environmental, and multi-level agent models to simulate multi-level transmission and impact of disease spread and evaluate the vulnerability of different communities to the potential outbreak of communicable diseases. The system developed in this research will help government organizations and industries develop better strategies and policies to prevent and manage the potential outbreak of communicable diseases.

This project will advance theory and algorithms of applied mathematic models for infectious disease spreading from MITACS, and geocomputation methods developed from past GEOIDE projects.

See the promotion sheet of this project.