EpiViz: A Visual Simulation of an Epidemic Model using a Cellular Automaton

Cellular Automata (CAs) are often used to simulate complex systems. One such application of a CA is to simulate the spread of disease through a susceptible population. This paper describes EpiViz, a CA-based epidemic simulator which uses a variety of input parameters, such as probability of infection, infectious period, vaccination rate, mode of infection, and probability of recovery to influence the resulting state of each entity in a CA over the course of a simulated disease outbreak. EpiViz then produces an animated representation of the outbreak. EpiViz allows a user to set disease related parameters prior to running a simulation to enable experimentation with various disease factors and to observe the effects on a susceptible population. Incorporating the traditional Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) disease model, EpiViz is able to visually display an outbreak on a day-to-day basis. Keywords—cellular automata, computational epidemiology, SIR model, disease simulation Submitted to: MSV ’13