The influence of active agent motility on SIRS epidemiological dynamics

TL;DR

This study models epidemic spread among self-propelled agents with stochastic internal states, revealing how agent motility influences SIRS dynamics and phase separation, with implications for understanding disease transmission in active populations.

Contribution

It introduces an agent-based model linking agent motility to SIRS epidemic dynamics and compares transmission protocols, providing new insights into phase separation in active-passive mixtures.

Findings

Transmission protocol effectiveness varies with infection rate.

Agent motility affects epidemic spread and phase separation.

Theoretical predictions align with agent-based simulation results.

Abstract

Active Brownian disks moving in two dimensions that exchange information about their internal state stochastically are chosen to model epidemic spread in a self-propelled population of agents under the susceptible-infected-recovered-susceptible (SIRS) framework. The state of infection of an agent, or disk, governs its self-propulsion speed; consequently, the activity of the agents in the system varies in time. Two different protocols (one-to-one and one-to-many) are considered for the transmission of disease from the infected to susceptible populations. The effectiveness of the two protocols are practically identical at high values of the infection transmission rate. The one-to-many protocol, however, outperforms the one-to-one protocol at lower values of the infection transmission rate. Salient features of the macroscopic SIRS model are revisited, and compared to predictions from the agent-based model. Lastly, the motility induced phase separation in a population of such agents with a fluctuating fraction of active disks is found to be well-described by theories governing phase separation in a mixture of active and passive particles with a constant fraction of passive disks.