Formal Specification and Experimental Analysis of an Interactive Epidemic Simulation Framework

Modeling environments to study epidemic outbreaks can be used as decision support tools by decision makers to support public health policies. However, although the current high performance simulation engines have become adept at rapidly simulating disease diffusion, computational environments for exploring complex mitigation strategies are fairly rudimentary. Interactive simulations provide a natural way to study the complicated co-evolution of disease dynamics and public policies. In this paper, we formalize the problem of interactive simulations and present experimental results based on an interactive simulation platform that we have recently developed.