Project information
- Category: Statistical Analysis
- Type: Simulation
- Client/Purpose: This experiment aims to understand the basic factors involved in spreading the flu in a small classroom setting utilizing Arena Software
- Project date: November, 2020
- Project URL: github
Analyzing the spread of infection in a hypothetical classroom.
This is a simple model demonstrating how to mimic the effect of an epidemic in a school setting. We used the SIR notation to denote Susceptible, Infectious and Recovered entities and we keep track of each group with counters. Initially 20 kids are created and then they are assigned coordinates in the system, they will move around in the system having a nice day at school. The arrivals happen all together, since we are not modeling a process with service times, we disregard the effect of a distribution for arrivals. The first infectious kid is created and arrives at school too. He’s placed in a random coordinate space and then the Susceptible kids next to him can become Infectious. They in turn can infect other Susceptible kids. They go to school from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. Then go home for 18 hours. Weekends were not modeled. The kids remain sick for 3 days, starting the next day and then recover with immunity. The simulation ends when there are no more infectious kids or all of them have recovered.
With this model, variables can be updated to admit a different population size, a higher probability of infection, more days of being infectious, more initial kids that are infectious on Day 1 and even a larger area of infectious spread.