Modeling epidemics using cellular automata

The main goal of this work is to introduce a theoretical model, based on cellular automata, to simulate epidemic spreading. Specifically, it divides the population into three classes: susceptible, infected and recovered, and the state of each cell stands for the portion of these classes of individuals in the cell at every step of time. The effect of population vaccination is also considered. The proposed model can serve as a basis for the development of other algorithms to simulate real epidemics based on real data. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.