Dynamical Processes on Transportation Networks: Effects on Infectious Disease Spreading

Abstract

In this thesis, we study the spread of an infectious disease in the context of India. For this, we construct a network of 446 cities having a population of over 1 Lakh and study the infection spread using an SIR metapopulation model. We build the traffic matrix for this network based on real-life data about three modes of transport - air, rail, and road. Given an outbreak location and some information about the disease parameters, we can predict the hazard at all other cities in the network. This is called a Hazard Map. In this thesis, we discuss two variations of it - Static Hazard Map and Dynamic Hazard Map. In Dynamic Hazard Map, the difference in time scales associated with the different modes of transport is taken into account. This is not the case for the former.