An Integrated Modeling Environment to Study the Co-evolution of Networks, Individual Behavior and Epidemics

plex networks are pervasive in social and physical sciences. Three recent global-scale contagions that have received attention in the media as well as academic circles are (1) current and past financial contagions (Desai 2003),1 (2) failure of the coupled infrastructure system caused by power-grid failure, for example, the Northeast blackout of 2003,2 and (3) potential pandemics caused by influenzalike illness (Halloran et al. 2008; Germann et al. 1983). Individuals, institutions, and governments could not prevent the Northeast blackout. However, they are aggressively developing interventions to control the current financial contagion and responding to reduce the economic burden and human suffering of the current H1N1 outbreak. Developing high-resolution computational models to reason about these systems is complicated and scientifically challenging for at least three reasons. First, these systems are extremely large (for example, pandemic planning at the scale of the United States, requiring models with 300 million agents). Second, Articles