A non-additive path-based reward credit scheme for traffic congestion management

Abstract

Person-to-person contact is fundamental to the spread of epidemics. Human mobility is important for understanding the pattern of person-to-person contact. Therefore, understanding human travel behavior is crucial to the understanding of the geographic spread of infectious diseases. Transportation models built to give details on human movement and contact can then be used to simulate epidemic spread. Such has been done in the epidemic model Episim. In addition, there is also research showing people’s social networks have strong influence on their travel behavior, such as destination choice. Therefore this study sets out to verify whether adding social network and coordinated destination choice to the epidemic model has impact on the spatio-temporal transmission progression of epidemics. Results show that though the total number of infections do not change, the addition of a social network and coordinated destination help capture during what kind of activities infection events are taking place. Coordinated travel with social networks contribute to a more rapid spread in the beginning. Moreover, results emphasize that social networks should be integrated in conjuncture with joint-travel to better capture social travel behavior and in turn epidemic spread.