Epidemiology of the Living Dead: A social Force Model of a Zombie Outbreak

TL;DR

This paper adapts a social force model to simulate a zombie outbreak in a building, revealing how zombie speed influences evacuation, infection spread, and casualties, providing insights applicable to real emergencies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel social force model for zombie outbreaks that incorporates infection dynamics and evacuation behavior, offering new understanding of outbreak progression.

Findings

Zombie speed critically affects infection rates.

Evacuation efficiency depends on zombie chase dynamics.

Model insights are relevant to real emergency scenarios.

Abstract

We adapt the social force model of crowd dynamics to capture the evacuation during a zombie outbreak from an academic building. Individuals navigate the building, opening doors, and evacuate to the nearest exit. Zombies chase the uninfected individuals, and once caught there is a probability of a susceptible individual being infected or killed, or for the zombie to be killed by the person being attacked. We find that the speed of the zombies plays a crucial role in the dynamics of the evacuation, the rate of infection, and the number of casualties during the outbreak. The model leads to insights that may be relevant to other, less fictitious, emergency situations.