Oscillations in an epidemiological model based on asynchronous probabilistic cellular automaton

Consider a contagious disease affecting a host population composed of two groups with distinct habits. At each time step, each individual of this population can be in one of two states: susceptible (S) or infective (I). Here, a SIS epidemic model based on cellular automaton (CA) is proposed to study the disease spreading in such a population. In this model, the state transitions are described by probabilistic rules and each group has its own schedule to update the states of its individuals. We also propose a set of difference equations (DE) to analyze this population dynamics and we show how these two approaches (CA and DE) can be equivalent. We noticed that oscillations can be found in the composition of the group with more active social life, but not in the composition of the other group. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.