Urban Mobility Epidemiologic Simulator

During the Covid19 epidemy, public authorities often made decisions based on the rule of thumb, in particular regarding people’s mobility. This can lead to inefficient or suboptimal measures in terms of epidemic propagation. Our Traffic Urban Mobility simulator for pandemic emergencies will make it possible to evaluate the impact of mobility restrictions policies on the virus spread. It will make decisions more reliable. Mobility restrictions will be adapted to the real situation of the virus: restrictions on mobility will, therefore, be reduced to the strict minimum and will respect public freedoms more.

The mobility of individuals is one of the main factors in the spread of pandemics. In the case of COVID-19, many countries have established some lockdown measures and restrictions on the mobility of individuals to contain the pandemic’s spreading. When the time comes for ending the quarantine and lockdowns, these measures will be gradually reduced, which could increase the risk of a second wave of COVID-19 contamination. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how the mobility of individuals impacts the spread of the virus, particularly in urban areas where population density is a major risk factor. The realization of a spatiotemporal simulator that allows modeling and analyzing the impact of mobility and prevention measures taken during pandemic situations will be beneficial to assist authorities in their decision making. 

We propose a spatial-temporal traffic simulator that allows modeling, analyzing, and evaluating the impact of urban mobility and public policies on the spread of a pandemic. The simulator contains three modules: a pandemic module, a traffic module, and finally, an analysis module.

The pandemic module contains mathematical models describing the propagation characteristics of a specific disease or pandemic in the studied environment, taking into consideration the mobility situation of individuals.

The Traffic module, takes in charge the modeling and simulation of traffic model in combination with the pandemic characteristics defined in the previous module. It is based on the open-source microscopic road traffic simulator SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility).

The final module is responsible for generating results based on the calculation of a set of indicators such as the infection numbers and speed based on the transport mode.

The developed simulator will be made available to scientific communities as an open-source code that could be reused and easily reimplemented for diverse types of diseases other than COVID-19. The simulator will also be used as a tool for assessing the impact of prevention policies regarding the management of a pandemic crisis in urban areas.

We address local authorities around the world to establish efficient policies to reduce the rapid spread of COVID-19 and other types of pandemics due to mobility in urban areas. We also address the scientific community interested in studying the relationship between individuals' mobility and the spread of contagious diseases. 

Local authorities made mobility restrictions decisions without any possible ways to evaluate the impact of their decisions on the virus spreading. Our simulator will help them base their decision on scientific results.

One of the main elements of this pandemic propagation is the mobility of individuals. Until now, no vaccine has been developed, so that the only way to prevent Covid19 spreading is by imposing some lockdown measures and restrictions on individuals' mobility. Using our solution will assist local authorities and decision-makers to establish optimal policies and restrictions to control the spread of CoVID-19 or any other contagious diseases and prevent having another wave of contamination in case of these restrictions reduction.

1-Combining a microscopic traffic urban simulator with epidemic models 

2- Simulating mobility restrictions impact on a pandemic crisis

The proposed solution is based on the open-source microscopic road traffic simulator SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility), developed by the Institute of Transport Systems at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) since 2001. It is a powerful micro-simulator that allows the simulation of different urban traffic components such as vehicles, public transport, and pedestrians. It allows the simulation of traffic in entire cities by using the open-source technology OpenStreetMap to import detailed geographical maps of these cities. Instead of developing the entire simulator from scratch, using this simulation framework will enable us to save a great deal of time and to focus on developing the pandemic and analysis modules and later add them to SUMO components.

SUMO has been used in several German and international projects to answer a wide variety of research questions. It has been used by the authorities of the city of Cologne, Germany, to forecast traffic during the Pope's visit in 2005 and the football World Cup in 2006 and to assist them in establishing control and security measures during these major events. It has also been used as a simulator in the VABENE++ project that aims to simulate and model large-scale traffic during disasters and public events to assist authorities in their decision making. These projects and others show that this simulator is a suitable choice for projects and solutions that aims to assist decision-makers in analyzing the impact of mobility and transport modes on various types of events, as well as in establishing optimal policies to manage the situations.

The solution is still in the stage of conception. As such it serves 0 people today. 

Within one year the tool developed could be used to manage Covid19 deconfinement in the Rabat area. This could serve up to 1 M people.

Within 5 years, the tool could be deployed to be used in several megacities in Africa and thus impact 10s of millions of people.

During the year to come, our goal is to develop and deploy our solution for the city of Rabat, which is Morocco Capital city. We target to demonstrate our technology to the Rabat City and Region authorities and offer them simulation services to evaluate the way they managed the covid19 crisis and evaluate alternative policies (in terms of public mobility) that have not been used. 

We also plan to deliver our solution, once it is stable, as open-source software to the scientific community and the local authorities to encourage the use of our solution and promote a scientific and optimal approach of mobility restrictions during epidemic periods.

Finding Data concerning CoVID-19 spread along with Traffic data collected in the same period and the same area as the pandemic data.

Finding fundings to finalize the simulator development.

We will use international data that will have been in the meantime made available as open access data. We will also contact the Moroccan health ministry and transport ministry and request access to the available data.

We submitted the simulator development project to several scientific call for projects.

Our team includes six members (2 permanent members and 4 contractors). The permanent members include the CEO of the project and a Senior Data Scientist.

The four contractors include an epidemiologist doctor and a  postdoctoral fellow that will work on developing the pandemic models in collaboration with the Data Scientist, a Ph.D. student and an intern that will work on integrating the pandemic models into the SUMO framework, define the test scenarios, and develop the analysis module.  

Our team has been working with the SUMO simulator since 2016, as part of a project to develop a traffic control and management system. Based on the SUMO framework we developed a traffic simulator of the Rabat city urban area. In addition an epidemiologist from the UM6P University who is working with the Moroccan Health Minister, is part of the project and brings its knowledge of the COVID-19 epidemiologic characteristics.

We partner with the UM6P University in Ben Guerrir (www.um6p.ma).

We plan to provide services for organisations that want to use our simulator and for organisation that need to set up mobility plans in pandemic situation.

We already applied to several Scientific call for project, and plan to keep doing so in the following months. This will give us the opportunity to finalize our simulator development.

We answer to solve to give visibility to our project and because we seek fundings.