A Standardized Framework for Modeling Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions in Individual-Based Infectious Disease Simulations

Individual-based infectious disease simulations play a fundamental role in the evaluation of intervention strategies before implementing them as public policy during emerging epidemics. While public health offices provide a vast array of potential measures in their preparedness plans, their mode of operation in practice is conditioned by a plethora of regional legal, economic, and demographic factors. This work introduces the Trigger-Strategy-Measure (TriSM) formalization as our main contribution and its implementation in the German Epidemic Microsimulation System (GEMS). TriSM is a standardized formalization for modeling complex interventions in individual-based infectious disease simulations, focusing on granularity, extensibility, expressiveness, and usability. We demonstrate TriSM's capabilities in six simulation case studies where we apply nuanced intervention strategies to a COVID-19-like outbreak scenario and evaluate their effectiveness. Our work contributes to the ongoing efforts of increasing fidelity and expatiating implicit assumptions in individual-based infectious disease models through a standardized formalization.