Avian Influenza

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Avian Influenza

• Agent Modeling

By DesiRhea Odom Jabeu Henderson Avi Aggarwal
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Project Description

• Create a model to project the possible outcomes
  if the poultry of a farm in NC were found with
  avian flu
• Start with bird-to-bird infection
• Virus mutates to bird-to-human infection and
  human-to-human infection
• Broader focus How will it affect the citizens of
  the town?

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Agent-based Modeling

• Computational modeling concept to simulate
  actions and interactions of individual agents in
  a network, with a view to assessing their effects
  on the system as a whole.
• Each agent autonomously runs the programs
• Simulating the simultaneous operations of
  multiple agents
• Two main software options at Shodor AgentSheets
  and NetLogo

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AgentSheets

• AgentSheets advantages
• Instead of writing out the code, there is an
  actions panel and a conditions panel
• Easier to use for beginners, pictorial
  development environment
• AgentSheets disadvantages
• Limited syntax and functionality to choose from
• Harder to see exactly where you went wrong when
  reviewing code after making a mistake

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NetLogo

• NetLogo advantages
• You actually get to write the code and setup the
  way you want your controls to be
• More complex programming structures, you can
  explore more detail with more syntax
• Pre-loaded shapes and colors
• NetLogo disadvantages
• Things dont always work as you expect, sometimes
  hard to pre-conceptualize code before writing it
• It can be very complicated at times when you
  cant figure out whats wrong.

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NetLogo meets our advance needs

• We choose NetLogo
• Most convenient, we had just learned about in the
  previous class.
• NetLogo better-suited for complexity of project
• Virus is complicated with three different agents
  with different behaviors and same virus spreading
• More scope for adding details and seeing how
  small changes in the model can affect the whole
  output
• Resulting from the compatibility of the program
  with the project description above, this software
  was also explicitly recommended for use in the
  project description

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The Model

• Chickens in farm, citizens cannot enter farm,
  only farmers can
• One chicken starts out with low mutation on virus
  and spreads it around, if the stakes are high
  enough the virus spreads to farmers and then
  citizens
• Bird-to-bird infection, bird-to-human infection,
  human-to-human infection

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How will this model be useful?

• Helpful in predicting broad results and the
  changes that can occur in the final citizen
  infection through small changes in the initial
  values
• Various factors to change
• Very realistic computational model without risks
  of actual real-world modeling non-invasive
  modeling
• Same results without any expense
• We can add even more factors to affect the spread
  of the virus and see how things work out

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What did we learn from the model?

• Many seemingly small things can significantly
  affect the output as a whole
• It was really hard for the virus to mutate enough
  to reach the human-to-human transmission stage
  under the given conditions

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What could be changed or added to the model?

• More rates and variables to make it more
  realistic
• Vaccines, add more factors to affect the lives of
  the agents such as energy and nutrition add a
  greater population and environment besides just
  the town with their own strain of virus
• More complex methods of infection and mutation

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Making the model

• Challenging
• Coming up with the right code and logic for what
  we were trying to do
• Proud of
• Unique methods and techniques to circumvent what
  we did not know

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Conclusion

• NetLogo was a great program to model this
  situation
• Results show that realistic chances of citizen
  infection is low
• Many factors are yet to be added
• Very challenging and rewarding experience, we
  learned a lot

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Acknowledgements

• Our sincere thanks to Valerie Gartland, Shodor
  staff member, for her insightful and deeply
  guiding help and instruction in completing this
  model.