Towards Rapid Design of Compartmental Models

In times of crisis, epidemiologists can come under great pressure to model rapidly evolving diseases and to produce analyses about the effects of potential public health interventions. Taking previously developed, tested, and validated model components as the base on which to prototype new infectious disease models can save precious time and effort. However, there is currently no systematic process for quickly navigating a corpus of existing epidemiological models or identifying and reusing their most useful components. In this paper, we propose a vision to accelerate the creation of prototype compartmental models for infectious diseases. We outline a semi-automated process that epidemiologists can use to create prototypes that have been partially completed with reused fragments from existing models. Epidemiologists can thus focus on modelling the novel aspects of an ongoing public health crisis, as opposed to aspects of it that are already more or less well understood in previous work. Our approach comprises five steps in total, including identifying useful components in a corpus of infectious disease models, generating potential candidate prototypes, and organizing them in a formal data structure that allows navigation and exploration by the modellers. We outline 13 challenges ahead and discuss potential solutions based on formal modelling techniques.