Epidemic transmission is a common type of public health emergency that is difficult to forecast and often causes substantial harm. Artificial societal models provide a novel approach to the study of public health problems. However, public health emergency management (PHEM) always involves multi-disciplinary and multi-hierarchical models that complicate the work of modeling. Models are also made more complex by the consideration of new requirements and interactions. Therefore, we propose a domain-specific methodology to guide the modeling process in PHEM. By analyzing domain characteristics and modeling requirements, a meta-modeling framework can be constructed, containing the basic elements with which to construct an artificial society to study epidemic transmission. In this paper, the designs of meta-models are discussed in detail, and domain models are implemented by code generation, which enables the support of large-scale, agent-based computational experiments on the KD-ACP platform. Case studies of Ebola are outlined, emergency scenarios are reconstructed based on pre-designed meta-models, and “scenario-response” experiments are presented. This study provides a valuable framework and methodology with which to study complex social problems in PHEM. The proposed method has been verified effectively and efficiently.
Test Analysis of Policies in Public Health Emergency Management in China
