CASOS Working PAPER

"BioWar: Scalable Multi-Agent Social and Epidemiological Simulation of Bioterrorism Events"(PDF file)
Authors: Carley, K. M., Fridsma, D., Casman, E., Altman, N., Chang, J., Kaminsky, B., Nave, D., Yahja, A.
Abstract
The reality of life is embedded in social networks. Understanding how social networks affect disease propagation and how the consequences of disease change social networks is critical for modeling early manifestation of diseases on diverse human activities. Moreover, disease outbreaks do not happen in vacuum, they are constrained by physical, economical, technological, media, health, and governmental infrastructures. It is critical to be able to systematically reason about the nature of outbreaks, early manifestation of diseases on diverse human activities, the potential of media and inoculation campaigns, and the relative value of various early warning devices. There is simply not enough actual data on bioattacks. What is needed is a cost-effective, ethical system for reasoning about such events. Focusing on sample-based statistical methods, conventional epidemiology ignores the reality of social networks and their dynamics, thus is illsuited for this. BioWar -- a scalable city-wide multi-agent network model - addresses the above needs. BioWar uses cognitively realistic agents embedded in social, health, and professional networks to describe how people acquire diseases, manifest symptoms, seek information, and seek care. We describe BioWar and present results showing the efficacy of the approach.