Mobile Agent-Based approach for modeling the epidemics of communicable diseases

The increase in the use of mobile phones generates the formation of mobile social networks which can make use of various purposes including education, public health and controlling epidemics. Social networks consist of the basic building blocks called as the communities within which the social interactions are intensive, but between which they are very weak. Everyone could observe that the spread of infectious disease inside communities often has the ability to cross countries borders and spread rapidly. With the widespread of diseases causing major public health problem, we argue that human mobility patterns not only influence the spreading, but are also useful for preventing and creating awareness of the diseases. In this paper, we present new opportunities offered by the field of mobile social networks for understanding the spread of infectious diseases. For this purpose we propose two models namely MABM (Mobile Agent Based Model) and SDC (Spread Discovery Control) model to understand the spread of communicable diseases between different regions. The proposed SDC model is used to comprehend the spread of diseases by extracting the community structures and the analysis of mobility pattern of each agent (user) within the mobile network. Moreover, the understanding of spread details helps us to propose the control strategy to avoid the spread of the epidemic disease on the specific region. To realize our proposed models in a better way, we have modeled one such communicable disease usually spreading every year in West African region.