Towards a Framework for High-Performance Simulation of Livestock Disease Outbreak: A Case Study of Spread of African Swine Fever in Vietnam

• Published in: Animals (Basel) 2021-09, Vol.11 (9), p.2743-19
• Main Authors: Pham, Linh Manh, Parlavantzas, Nikos, Le, Huy-Ham, Bui, Quang Hung
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African swine fever; Animal diseases; Animal health; Case studies; Cattle; Computer applications; Computer Science; Data models; Decision making; Disease control; Disease transmission; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing; Epidemic models; Epidemics; Epidemiology; Fever; high-performance simulation; Hogs; Infections; Internet of Things; Livestock; Mathematical models; modeling; Pandemics; Public health; Radio frequency identification; Simulation; Standardization; Storage; Swine; transmission and spread; veterinary epidemiology; Viruses
• ISSN: 2076-2615; 2076-2615
• DOI: 10.3390/ani11092743

The spread of disease in livestock is an important research topic of veterinary epidemiology because it provides warnings or advice to organizations responsible for the protection of animal health in particular and public health in general. Disease transmission simulation programs are often deployed with different species, disease types, or epidemiological models, and each research team manages its own set of parameters relevant to their target diseases and concerns, resulting in limited cooperation and reuse of research results. Furthermore, these simulation and decision support tools often require a large amount of computational power, especially for models involving tens of thousands of herds with millions of individuals spread over a large geographical area such as a region or a country. It is a matter of fact that epidemic simulation programs are often heterogeneous, but they often share some common workflows including processing of input data and execution of simulation, as well as storage, analysis, and visualization of results. In this article, we propose a novel architectural framework for simultaneously deploying any epidemic simulation program both on premises and on the cloud to improve performance and scalability. We also conduct some experiments to evaluate the proposed architectural framework on some aspects when applying it to simulate the spread of African swine fever in Vietnam.