Modelling COVID-19 transmission in supermarkets using an agent-based model

10/15/2020
by   Fabian Ying, et al.
0

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in early March 2020, UK supermarkets have implemented different policies to reduce the virus transmission in stores to protect both customers and staff, such as restricting the maximum number of customers in a store, changes to the store layout, or enforcing a mandatory face covering policy. To quantitatively assess these mitigation methods, we formulate an agent-based model of customer movement in a supermarket (which we represent by a network) with a simple virus transmission model based on the amount of time a customer spends in close proximity to infectious customers. We apply our model to synthetic store and shopping data to show how one can use our model to estimate the number of infections due to human-to-human contact in stores and how to model different store interventions. The source code is openly available at https://github.com/fabianying/covid19-supermarket-abm. We encourage retailers to use the model to find the most effective store policies that reduce virus transmission in stores and thereby protect both customers and staff.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
06/26/2020

Simulating human interactions in supermarkets to measure the risk of COVID-19 contagion at scale

Taking the context of simulating a retail environment using agent based ...
research
10/22/2022

COVID-19 Infection Exposure to Customers Shopping during Black Friday

The outbreak of COVID-19 within the last two years has resulted in much ...
research
08/17/2021

Simulating COVID19 Transmission From Observed Movement: An Agent-Based Model of Classroom Dispersion

Current models of COVID-19 transmission predict infection from reported ...
research
01/05/2023

Playing hide and seek: tackling in-store picking operations while improving customer experience

The evolution of the retail business presents new challenges and raises ...
research
04/29/2021

Digital Resistance during COVID-19: A Workflow Management System of Contactless Purchasing and Its Empirical Study of Customer Acceptance

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated the shift of work and life from the...
research
04/27/2020

How to restart? An agent-based simulation model towards the definition of strategies for COVID-19 "second phase" in public buildings

Restarting public buildings activities in the "second phase" of COVID-19...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset