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.