Simulating real-life scenarios to better understand the spread of diseases under different contexts

Abstract

Current statistical models to simulate pandemics miss the most relevant information about the close atomic interactions between individuals which is the key aspect of virus spread. Thus, they lack a proper visualization of such interactions and their impact on virus spread. In the field of computer graphics, and more specifically in computer animation, there have been many crowd simulation models to populate virtual environments. However, the focus has typically been to simulate reasonable paths between random or semi-random locations in a map, without any possibility of analyzing specific individual behavior. We propose a crowd simulation framework to accurately simulate the interactions in a city environment at the individual level, with the purpose of recording and analyzing the spread of human diseases. By simulating the whereabouts of agents throughout the day by mimicking the actual activities of a population in their daily routines, we can accurately predict the location and duration of interactions between individuals, thus having a model that can reproduce the spread of the virus due to human-to-human contact. Our results show the potential of our framework to closely simulate the virus spread based on real agent-to-agent contacts. We believe that this could become a powerful tool for policymakers to make informed decisions in future pandemics and to better communicate the impact of such decisions to the general public.