Welcome to EMOD-Generic

The Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) develops disease modeling software that is tested and shared with the research community to advance the understanding of disease dynamics. This software helps determine the combination of health policies and intervention strategies that can lead to disease eradication.

EMOD is an agent-based model (ABM) that simulates the simultaneous interactions of agents in an effort to recreate complex phenomena. Each agent (such as a human or vector) can be assigned a variety of "properties" (for example, age, gender, etc.), and their behavior and interactions with one another are determined by using decision rules. These models have strong predictive power and are able to leverage spatial and temporal dynamics.

EMOD is also stochastic, meaning that there is randomness built into the model. Infection, recovery, and many other processes are represented as probabilistically. When a susceptible person comes into contact with a pathogen, they are not guaranteed to become infected. This randomness better approximates what happens in reality. It also means that many simulations are needed to determine the probability of particular outcomes.

Documentation is broken up into disease-specific sets that provide guidance for researchers modeling particular diseases. This documentation set includes installation and usage instructions for the Generic model, which can be used to simulate a variety of different low-complexity diseases, such as measles. The EMOD-Generic repository on GitHub hosts the Generic-Ongoing branch of EMOD, which is the home for the most recent features of the Generic model.