The impact of awareness diffusion on SIR-like epidemics in multiplex networks

Abstract

The epidemic diseases have been threatening to human health, and it is of high importance to understand the properties of epidemic propagation among the population will help us to take some effective measures to prevent and control epidemic spreading. In this paper, we propose a novel epidemic model by using two-layer multiplex networks to investigate the multiple influence between awareness diffusion and epidemic propagation, where the upper layer represents the awareness diffusion regarding epidemics and the lower layer expresses the epidemic propagation. In the process of awareness diffusion, the unaware individuals will be aware of the epidemics if the ratio between their awareness neighbors and their degrees reaches the specified ratio. For the epidemic spreading in the lower layer, we use the classical SIR(susceptible-infected-recovered) model. We derive the epidemic threshold by using Micro-Markov chain approach. The analytical results indicate that the epidemic threshold is correlated with the awareness diffusion as well as the topology of epidemic networks. Finally, the simulation results further demonstrate the properties of epidemic propagation and validate the analytical results.