Infectious hospital agents: An individual-based simulation framework

In this paper we present the plan, motivation, background, and the design of an agent-based simulation framework describing the spread of Hospital-Associated Infections (HAIs). We are developing a general simulation environment that is able to model wide range of pathogen transmission scenarios in hospital environment. The elements of the simulation include among others: admission and discharge patients, pathogen transmission via healthcare workers, colonization and infection, modelling hospital events, scheduling treatments, the interventions against HAI spreading. The evolution of the model is tracked in discrete time, and the simulation is driven by stochastic events sampled from predefined distributions. Our aim is to build a general, customisable and extensible simulation environment for the domain of HAIs, therefore the presented design is in Object-Oriented fashion. We implement the system in R using S4 classes, although the design is general. The results of the simulations are time series and transmission networks.