What happens when cities in the Copenhagen region experience a COVID-19 flame? Would school closures have any effect, or would a better choice lead parents to work from home? As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities around the world have implemented measures several times to monitor the pandemic.
Now, researchers from the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University have come up with a new agent-based model that can be used as a tool to make even better, informed choices about what the limitations would be. should be implemented.
Background on the use of agent-based modeling to analyze, predict, and control the rapid release of COVID-19 is outlined in the paper Fluid Model-Checking in UPPAAL for Covid-19 published in the prestigious lecture notes series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
167 fewer new cases per day
In the new model, the researchers simulate interactions between specific representatives or in other words, individuals. Based on data from Statistics Denmark, the Danish Construction and Housing Register (BBR), the Central Business Register and the Danish State Serum Institute, the researchers have used the agent-based technic to model North Jutland. construction, by more than 500,000 individuals.
The area was locked up in November for fear of spreading the cluster-5 version of the coronavirus, circulating mainly in farm mink.
In the model, each person is given a state of health, which is combined with general data on addresses, places of employment, family sizes and travel patterns to measure true images of the movement patterns of Northern Jutland residents.
The head of the project, Professor Kim Guldstrand Larsen, explains that the researchers have simulated case numbers in the region over 100 days based on two different scenarios: One situation where locks were imposed, and the actual situation where schools and town limits were closed, etc .:
– The model allows us to take real samples of diseases. In our assessment, over a two-month period the closure came down to about 10,000 fewer cases in North Jutland, Kim Guldstrand Larsen said.
In the context of the model which predicts that there would have been around 70,000 cases in the area in that period if a lock had not been implemented, this equates to a 14 per cent reduction. in the total number of cases over the two months. This equates to 167 fewer new cases per day.
– We can design the right conditions for the spread of the disease under different conditions. If we turn back a few months, we would be able to predict the probability of the cluster-5 change spreading across the regional border, says Kim Guldstrand Larsen.
• Image: How Covid-19 circulates in North Jutland
Weather forecast for covid-19 release
The Northern Jutland model is based on open data – in other words, the researchers do not have access to sensitive personal data. If they had accurate data on, for example, where people live and where they work, they would be able to predict with certainty whether everyone would soon become infected.
– Authorities have access to the real numbers and will be able to use the model to make very accurate simulations of the real world situation. With the current data, the model should be seen as a tool for more advanced predictive contagion detection – a kind of weather forecast for COVID-19 releases. We have used Northern Jutland as our place of departure, but the model can be used anywhere with a certain amount of data, says Kim Guldstrand Larsen.
Computing power required
To develop the model, the researchers have used the UPPAAL software tool, which they themselves have developed over the past 20 years. The tool has been used to study a number of complex systems in the world, including heating and traffic control systems, where the behavior of the entire system is provided by the interaction of multiple -complicated its parts. In the new scenario, the parts of the model are humans interacting through contagion.
– Prior to this, we’ve been working with 2,000-component systems, so of course, it was a leap to the 500,000 components we’re working with now. This requires a lot of computing power, and as far as I know, we are part of a limited group of researchers capable of this type of simulation, says Kim Guldstrand Larsen, drawing attention to the work of -American workers who recently published a similar study in Nature.
Danish authorities have shown great interest in the work of Danish researchers, and Kim Guldstrand Larsen has high expectations that the model will be used by the Danish State Serum Institute.
– We expect the model to be used, but also to be used in the future to create weather forecasts for things like the flu.
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Magazine Reference:
Jensen, PG, et al. (2020) Fluid Model Study at UPPAAL for Covid-19. International Symposium on Reducing Applications of Formal Methods. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61362-4_22.