Simulating the spread of epidemics in China on multi-layer transportation networks: Beyond COVID-19 in Wuhan

System Dynamics Group, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA

Received: 13 March 2020
Accepted: 4 June 2020

Abstract

A general-purpose simulator for the spread of epidemics in China is built. The Chinese public transportation system between over 340 prefectural-level cities is modeled as a multi-layer network having block structure, with layers representing different means of transportation (airlines, railways, sails, buses), and nodes representing two categories of cities (central, peripheral). At each city, an open-system SEIR model tracks the local spread of the disease, with population in- and out-flow exchanging with the overlying transportation network. The model accounts for 1) different transmissivities on different transportation media, 2) the transit of inbound flow, 3) cross-infection in public transportation due to path overlap, and that 4) infected population not entering public transportation, 5) recovered population not subject to repeated infections. The model is used to simulate the spread of COVID-19 in China; it shows that the framework is robust and reliable, and best-fit inversion results match public datasets to an extraordinary extent.