Supervised by: Professor George Milne
This simulation reproduces a real life landscape with imaginary towns and transport links between them. Towns and roads are human influenced and attract high population densities. Natural features such as rivers lead to development along their shores. Conversely, other geographical features such as mountain ranges or swamps will limit development.
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The synthetic landscape shows how an epidemic is likely to spread along features of high density before spreading across open space. There are three points of high population density, two of which are connected by a transport link which has its own settlement developed on either side of it. The north-west and south-east towns both have 100 infectives and 900 subsceptibles.
The results of this simulation are presented in the lag map. The lag map is basically a series of snapshots taken at time t = 0,20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 200, 300 .
Each cell is represented by a coloured square: red square contains at least one infective host and white squares contain only susceptible and recovered hosts. The simulation illustrates how the epidemic follows the lines of population density to produce the fuzzy cross pattern.
After 300 time steps, the top left outbreak has reached all four edges of the map but the bottom right outbreak is yet to reach any. Notice that the epidemic spreads outward along the arms or roads before filling up the space between the roads.
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