Abstract for: Modeling Propagation of Infectious Disease as a Connected Network

A pandemic is likely to occur in the near future, and this could cause significant disruptions in the human population. Avian influenza is such an example, as it can potentially evolve to transmit from human to human, and spread very fast to become a world-wide epidemic in very a short period of time. In order to prepare for such a disaster and to develop global mitigation strategies for society, the government as well as enterprises needs to understand how widely diseases might spread, and how quickly the magnitude of the infection might grow as well. As the world has rapidly evolved to become a more global chain, the populace contact, social networking and transportation enables diseases to spread more easily than before. In this paper, we present a disease spread model that combines compartmental epidemiological model with a connected network of geographical locations and airports using the system dynamics method. We also quantify how various mitigation actions would affect the spread of disease. This model is intended to be used for firms studying the possible effects of pandemic disease on their businesses. Various scenarios of disease spreads are simulated and examined in this research.