Abstract

Streptococcus Pneumoniae is a bacterium that causes several infections like pneumonia, otitis media, meningitis and sepsis. Today, due to vaccination against many other epidemics, these are one of the most common and dangerous illnesses for small children in developed countries. The purpose of this work is to develop an agent based model that is able to simulate a pathogen like Streptococcus Pneumoniae and to understand the long term effects of different vaccination strategies. The main part of the work is to explain the model structure in detail, understand the benefits and problems of such an agent based epidemic model and find out how the model behaves in different situations. Also profound data search has to be done to understand the whole system and identify the model parameters as accurately as possible. It is important to realize how to cope with restrictions in data quality and different results of different studies. Agent based models are only one approach to simulation of epidemics so other people of the research group are simulating the same problem with different model types. In the end the results of the different models should be compared and benefits of the different approaches have to be discussed.