Introduction¶
This manual provides a brief description of the Stride software and its features. Stride stands for Simulation of transmission of infectious diseases and is an agent-based modeling system for close-contact disease transmission developed by researchers at the University of Antwerp and Hasselt University, Belgium. The simulator uses census-based synthetic populations that capture the demographic and geographic distributions, as well as detailed social networks. Stride is an open source software. The authors hope to make large-scale agent-based epidemic models more useful to the community. More info on the project and results obtained with the software can be found in [WST+15].
The model population consists of households, schools, workplaces and communities, which represent a group of people we define as a “cluster”. Social contacts can only happen within a cluster. When school or work is off, people stay at home and in their primary community and can have social contacts with the other members. During other days, people are present in their household, secundary community and a possible workplace or school.
We use a Simulator
class to organize the activities from the
people in an Area
. The Area class has a Population
,
different Cluster
objects and a Contact Handler
.
The Contact Handler
performs Bernoulli trials to
decide whether a contact between an infectious and susceptible person
leads to disease transmission. People transit through
Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered states, similar to an
influenza-like disease. Each Cluster
contains a link to its
members and the Population
stores all personal data, with
Person
objects. The implementation is based on the open source
model from Grefenstette et al. [GBR+13]. The
household, workplace and school clusters are handled separately from the
community clusters, which are used to model general community contacts.
The Population
is a collection of Person
objects.