10 The Use of Cellular Automata for Modelling (Sir)^N Diseases with Migratory Reinfection

The re-infection of individuals who have successfully recovered from a specific disease is a major health concern. In the absence of vaccines and other treatments, reinfection can occur when there is movement between populations and within populations. There is a growing interest as to how to model population movements in order to find optimal control strategies. The approach proposed here uses cellular automata to model reinfection under one possible migration scheme and demonstrates how population movements can lead to different patterns of reinfection among four populations of different size.