[Defense] Design and Implementation of a City-based Model for Simulating COVID-19 Spread
Thursday, April 21, 2022
2:45 pm - 4:00 pm
In
Partial
Fulfillment
of
the
Requirements
for
the
Master
of
Science
Hoang
Vo
will
defend
his
thesis
Design
and
Implementation
of
a
City-based
Model
for
Simulating
COVID-19
Spread
Abstract
Since 2019, COVID-19 has challenged health worldwide. To better understand the disease, scientists developed agent-based and other models to simulate the spread of COVD-19. Simulations with agent-based models have become popular in recent years due to the development of new technologies and novel programming resources. Agent-based models create agents and let agents interact with each other based on a set of rules. Thanks to simulated results of agent-based models, scientists can better understand the spread of the disease and were able to evaluate the effectiveness of particular measures against the spread of COVID-19. This thesis designed and implemented a city-based, agent-based model named COVID19-CBABM to simulate the spread of COVID-19. The model simulates the spread of the pandemic disease inside a particular city based on given information about its population and its point-of-interests which are visited by people, living in this city. COVID19-CBABM has two types of agents: human agents and point-of-interest agents. Human agents mimic movements and behaviors of citizens while point-of-interest agents model houses, schools, hospitals, offices and other places in the city. COVID19-CBABM also reuses the SEIHRD framework to model how Coronavirus is transmitted among human hosts. The model was initially developed to simulate the COVID-19 spread in New York City. We employed the Mesa framework to create an agent-based model in python 3.7. Mesa uses built-in components and customized classes to generate the agents in COVID19-CBABM. To evaluate the COVID19-CBABM model, we compared the simulated results with actual data of COVID-19 spread in New York City in August 2021. We also analyzed to which extent the developed model can be reused to simulate spread of COVID-19 in other cities, such as Houston. One challenge of such a reuse is to adapt model parameters that have been estimated based on New York City data, to match the specific characteristics of Houston.
Thursday,
April
21,
2022
2:45PM
-
4:00PM
CT
Online
via
Dr. Christoph Eick, thesis advisor
Faculty, students and the general public are invited.
