Insights from Modeling Epidemics of Infectious Diseases - A Literature Review

The relevance of modeling epidemics’ spread goes beyond the academic. The mathematical understanding of infectious diseases has become an important tool in policy making. Our research interest is modeling of dynamics in crisis situations. This paper explores the extant body of literature of mathematical models in epidemiology, with particular emphasis on theories and methodologies used beyond them. Our goal is to identify core building blocks of models and research patterns to model the dynamics of crisis situations such as epidemics. The wide range of applications of epidemic models to many other disciplines that show biological analogies, makes this paper helpful for many modelers and mathematicians within the broader field of Crisis Management.