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Agent Based Modelling and West Nile Virus: A Survey

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Abstract

West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne disease heavily influenced by Avian species as amplifying hosts. In many other mosquito-borne diseases humans act as amplifying host. This, in general, makes the modelling effort of WNV fundamentally differs from other mosquito-borne diseases. Agent-based modelling (ABM) is a fairly recent approach for studying complex systems such as WNV transmission. Intrinsically, ABMs can capture heterogeneous properties of a system by designing the rules of behaviour at an individual-level. In the WNV epidemiology, these individuals (i.e. agents) are various species of mosquitoes, birds and mammals (including humans). In this paper, we survey the literature of some traditional mathematical models of WNV, a number of agent-based models of mosquito behaviours and mosquito-borne diseases, as well as ABM within the WNV epidemiology. While there is a relatively large number of studies of both ABMs and WNV models on their own, very few WNV–ABM exist.

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Funding

Funding was supported by The Teaching Reform Project of Higher Education of Zhejiang Province (No. jg20160374), The Teaching Reform Project of Higher Education of Zhejiang Province (No. jg20160374).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 5V6, Canada

    Hamid Reza Nasrinpour & Robert D. McLeod

  2. Centre for Engineering Professional Practice & Engineering Education, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

    Marcia R. Friesen

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  1. Hamid Reza Nasrinpour
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Correspondence to Hamid Reza Nasrinpour.

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Nasrinpour, H.R., Friesen, M.R. & McLeod, R.D. Agent Based Modelling and West Nile Virus: A Survey. J. Med. Biol. Eng. 39, 178–183 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40846-018-0396-8

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