Building commuting flows for an agent based disease spreading simulation system based on aggregated information

In the kernel of an agent-based disease-spreading simulation system, the key factor is the commuting flows of students and workers during weekdays, which gives the movement of people between their residents and offices/schools. During commuting, people who lived in different areas mixed, which increases the spatial spreading of the virus temporally. It is difficult to extract the exact flow from data such as the census. However, small-scale survey examples and aggregated information, such as the size of schools and dormitories and transportation utilization, are known. Using the above, together with information on transportation routes and public transits, in this paper, we give a method based on the well-known flow conservation principle to construct a commuting flow in Taiwan. Validations are given to show such constructed data to fairly describe the real flow by observing our simulation system’s behaviors against what happened in previous pandemics.