EpiStrat: A tool for comparing strategies for tackling urban epidemic outbreaks

Abstract

Management and mitigation of epidemic outbreaks is a major challenge for health-care authorities and governments in general. In this paper, we first give a formal definition of a strategy for dealing with epidemics, especially in heterogeneous urban environments. Different strategies target different demographic classes of a city, and hence have different effects on the progression and impact of an epidemic. One has to therefore choose among various competing strategies. We show how the relative merits of these strategies can be compared against various metrics. We demonstrate our approach by developing a tool that has an agent based discrete event simulator engine at its core. We believe that such a tool can provide a valuable what-if analysis and decision support infrastructure to urban health-care authorities for tackling epidemics. We also present a running example on an influenza-like disease on synthetic populations and demographics and compare different strategies for outbreaks.