Abstract
BackgroundSince the outbreak of pandemics, influenza has caused extensive attention in the field of public health. It is actually hard to distinguish what is the most effective method to control the influenza transmission within airport terminal. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively evaluate the influences of passenger source, immunity difference and social relation structure on the influenza transmission in terminal.MethodsA method combining hierarchical structure of personal contact network with agent-based SEIR model was proposed to analyze the characteristics of influenza diffusion within terminal. Based on the spatial distance between individuals, the hierarchical structure of personal contact network was defined to construct a complex relationship of passengers in the real world. Moreover, the agent-based SEIR model was improved by considering the individual level of influenza spread characteristics. To evaluate the method, this process was fused in simulation based on the constructed personal contact network.ResultsIn the terminal we investigated, personal contact network was defined by following four layers: social relation structure, procedure partition, procedure area, and the whole terminal. With the growing of layer, the degree distribution curves move right. The value of degree distribution p(k) reached a peak at a specific value, and then back down. Besides, with the increase of layer α, the clustering coefficients presented a tendency to exponential decay. Based on the influenza transmission experiments, the main infected areas were concluded when considering different factors. Moreover, partition of passenger sources was found to impact a lot in departure, while social relation structure imposed a great influence in arrival. Besides, immunity difference exerted no obvious effect on the spread of influenza in the transmission process both in departure and arrival.ConclusionsThe proposed method is efficient to reproduce the evolution process of influenza transmission, and exhibits various roles of each factor in different processes, also better reflects the effect of passenger topological character on influenza spread. It contributes to proposing effective influenza measures by airport relevant department and improving the efficiency and ability of epidemic prevention on the public health.
Highlights
Since the outbreak of pandemics, influenza has caused extensive attention in the field of public health
We propose a method to quantitatively analyze the influences on influenza transmission in terminal by integrating agent-based SEIR model with hierarchical structure of personal contact network
The agent-based susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed (SEIR) model is used to describe dynamics of influenza transmission mechanism and passenger social relation structure is captured and quantified by utilization of hierarchical network of personal contact. With this method, it is possible to study the impact of passenger sources, immunity difference, and social relation structures on influenza diffusion
Summary
Since the outbreak of pandemics, influenza has caused extensive attention in the field of public health. Scholars have put forward a series of pedestrian flow models for the researches in crowd behavior and characteristic, such as cellular automata model, magnetic force model, queuing model, social force model [6], small world network [7,8,9] and so on. These methods have inherent drawback in descripting heterogeneous individual, complex personal contact network among individuals and the autonomic behaviors
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