VIRIS: Simulating indoor airborne transmission combining architectural design and people movement

TL;DR

VIRIS is an agent-based simulator that integrates architectural design and people movement to rapidly assess airborne infection risks indoors, aiding policymakers and architects in mitigation planning.

Contribution

It introduces VIRIS, a fast, open-source tool combining architectural data, human movement, and viral transmission modeling for indoor infection risk assessment.

Findings

Validated with a courtroom superspreader event data

Compared various non-pharmaceutical interventions in care homes and supermarkets

Developed a user-friendly web app for scenario exploration

Abstract

A Viral Infection Risk Indoor Simulator (VIRIS) has been developed to quickly assess and compare mitigations for airborne disease spread. This agent-based simulator combines people movement in an indoor space, viral transmission modelling and detailed architectural design, and it is powered by topologicpy, an open-source Python library. VIRIS generates very fast predictions of the viral concentration and the spatiotemporal infection risk for individuals as they move through a given space. The simulator is validated with data from a courtroom superspreader event. A sensitivity study for unknown parameter values is also performed. We compare several non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) issued in UK government guidance, for two indoor settings: a care home and a supermarket. Additionally, we have developed the user-friendly VIRIS web app that allows quick exploration of diverse scenarios of interest and visualisation, allowing policymakers, architects and space managers to easily design or assess infection risk in an indoor space.