Introduction. Outbreaks of infectious diseases and the COVID-19 pandemic in particular pose a serious public health challenge.
The other side of the challenge is always opportunity, and today such opportunities are information technology, decision making systems, best practices of proactive management and control based on modern methods of data analysis (data driven decision making) and modeling.
The article reviews the prospects for the use of publicly available software in modeling epidemiological trends. Strengths and weaknesses, main characteristics and possible aspects of application are considered.
The purpose of the article is to review publicly available health software. Give situations in which one or another approach will be useful. Segment and determine the effectiveness of the underlying models. Note the prospects of high-performance computing to model the spread of epidemics.
Results. Although deterministic models are ready for practical use without specific additional settings, they lose comparing to other groups in terms of their functionality. To obtain evaluation results from stochastic and agentoriented models, you first need to specify the epidemic model, which requires deeper knowledge in the field of epidemiology, a good understanding of the statistical basis and the basic assumptions on which the model is based. Among the considered software, EMOD (Epidemiological MODelling software) from the Institute of Disease Modeling is a leader in functionality.
Conclusions. There is a free access to a relatively wide set of software, which was originally developed by antiepidemiological institutions for internal use in decision-making, however was later opened to the public. In general, these programs have been adapted to increase their practical application. Got narrowed focus on potential issues. The possibility of adaptive use was provided.
We can note the sufficient informativeness and convenience of using the software of the group of deterministic methods. Also, such models have a rather narrow functional focus. Stochastic models provide more functionality, but lose some of their ease of use. We have the maximum functionality from agentoriented models, although for their most effective use you need to have the appropriate skills to write program code.
Keywords: epidemiological software, deterministic modeling, stochastic modeling, agentoriented mode-ling, high performance computing, decision making systems.
Usage of Publicly Available Software for Epidemiological Trends Modelling