Abstract
Simulation models have always been an aid in epidemiology for understanding the spread of epidemics and evaluating their containment policies. This paper illustrates how hybrid simulation can support companies in assessing COVID-19 containment measures in indoor environments. In particular, a Hybrid Simulation (HS) is presented. The HS model consists of an Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) to simulate the virus contagion model and a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model to simulate the interactions between flows of people in an indoor environment. Compared with previous works in the field of simulation and COVID-19, this study provides the possibility to model the specific behaviors of individuals moving in time and space and the proposed HS model could be adapted to several epidemiological conditions (just setting different parameters in the agent-based model) and different kinds of facilities. The HS approach has been developed and then successfully tested with a real case study related to a university campus in northern Italy. The case study highlights the potentials of hybrid simulation in assessing the effectiveness of the containment measures adopted during the period under examination in the pandemic context. From a managerial perspective, this study, exploiting the complementarity of the ABM and DES approaches in a HS model, provides a complete and usable tool to support decision-makers in evaluating different contagion containment measures.
Highlights
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are a large family of respiratory viruses such as MERS (MiddleEast Respiratory Syndrome) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome)
Twice the attractors have been added in each classroom, and the database that describes the entrance of the students in the University has been modified, inserting every potential time of arrival of the 384 participating students
The first, more related to the case study under investigation, shows how simulation is an effective tool for re-designing people flows and internal processes and assessing COVID-19 containment measures and enables to highlight some lessons learned that can be used as starting point from the decision makers
Summary
East Respiratory Syndrome) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). They are common in several animal species but can evolve to infect humans and spread between people in rare cases. The first epidemiological models appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, but many epidemiological models studying different infective diseases have been developed since the mid-1950s. Many studies use mathematical modeling in the epidemiological field in the scientific literature, explicitly representing the epidemic dynamics [5]. These studies help evaluate different infection control interventions, assess the burden of infection, and further understand their epidemiology. Fourteen studies published since 2004 have been selected and analyzed to conduct a short literature overview for identifying the most used epidemiological approaches (Table 1)
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