Epi-EWS

Epi-EWS is led by Dr Alejandro Marti from Mitiga Solutions, Spain. The idea of the project is to define, adapt and refine models that help to timely detect and contain the spread of epidemics, especially for populations on the move. Of course, the model will be adjusted to COVID-19 cases. The goal is to develop an early warning system (EWS) that will be able to provide fast detection of epidemic outbreaks, accurate predictions of the disease spread, and assessment of the outbreak's economic impact. To achieve this general objective, it will be necessary to model the evolution of a large number of individuals related to the development (or absence thereof) of an epidemic outbreak. The scientists think that this model must take into account the habits of the individuals, their relationship with the environment, the spread of the disease, the performance of specific controls, and eventual treatment. The experts consider such a highly complex system will be complicated to build using analytical models. For this reason, they plan to use Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS) for simulating citizens' behaviour. The goal is to build a comparative platform - Epi-EWS (Model Aggregator Platform for Epidemics) aimed at evaluating different ABM platforms to exercise models from the Epi-EWS project and determine which alternative is better suited to COVID-19 modelling. Mitiga Solutions is a spin-off of the National Supercomputing Center in Spain. The company focuses on predicting and mitigating the impact of natural and social hazards. It is in collaboration with a large number of organisations around the world. The CEO of Mitiga is also a member of the Industrial Advisory Committee of PRACE. PRACE awarded the team of Mitiga 5 000 000 core hours on Beskow, hosted by KTH-PDC in Sweden.