Introduction to Group-Structured-Epidemic Model

The spread of an infectious disease in a population is a random process when considering a small group of individuals. However, to a great group of individuals, the use of deterministic behavior is better. Based on these facts, in the literature, there were proposed stochastic and deterministic epidemic models. This work proposes a mixed compartmental epidemic model that allows stratifying the population into groups, considers demographic and environmental variability, presents an approximation to stochastic effects, and contemplates the network effects. The proposed model has a compact form to assist in the synthesis of the control law and parameters estimation strategies. Its objective is to overcome the difficulties encountered when used purely deterministic or purely stochastic models. In the end, to detail and verify the functioning of the proposed model, we present a set of flowcharts and simulations.