Coupling kinetic theory approaches for pedestrian dynamics and disease contagion in a confined environment

Abstract

The goal of this work is to study an infectious disease spreading in a medium size population occupying a confined environment. For this purpose, we consider a kinetic theory approach to model crowd dynamics in bounded domains and couple it to a kinetic equation to model contagion. The interactions of a person with other pedestrians and the environment are modeled by using tools of game theory. The pedestrian dynamics model allows to weight between two competing behaviors: the search for less congested areas and the tendency to follow the stream unconsciously in a panic situation. Each person in the system has a contagion level that is affected by the people in their neighborhood. For the numerical solution of the coupled problem, we propose a numerical algorithm that at every time step solves one crowd dynamics problem and one contagion problem, i.e. with no subiterations between the two. We test our coupled model on a problem involving a small crowd walking through a corridor.

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