A Monte Carlo simulation model of epidemic problem incorporating the interplaying between the crowd panic and infectious disease

Abstract

In this paper, based on a multi-layer network consisting of a social network and a physical contact network, we propose a microscopic Monte Carlo simulation model to reproduce the interaction and spread phenomena in the crowd from complex network perspective. The model mainly is used to reproduce the epidemic spread in the situation that the crowd becomes panic showing preventive control behaviors. This coupled microscopic simulation model considers variable infectious rate, recovery rate, panic heterogeneity and preventive measures suitable for studying different actual scenarios. Under the proposed framework, we can take quantitative analysis to measure the influences of various infectious rate, recovery rate, network structure and preventive measures on the spreading of diseases and panic. By comparing a large number of statistical results of the simulation experiments to study different scenarios, it is displayed that the established micro-simulation framework has certain advantages in scalability to consider more different actual scenarios and facilitating the researchers to grasp the global trend to learn what consequences the individual behavior will make.