Risks of an epidemic in a two-layered railway-local area traveling network

In view of the huge investments into the construction of high speed rails systems in USA, Japan, and China, we present a two-layer traveling network model to study the risks that the railway network poses in case of an epidemic outbreak. The model consists of two layers with one layer representing the railway network and the other representing the local-area transportation subnetworks. To reveal the underlying mechanism, we also study a simplified model that focuses on how a major railway affects an epidemic. We assume that the individuals, when they travel, take on the shortest path to the destination and become non-travelers upon arrival. When an infection process co-evolves with the traveling dynamics, the railway serves to gather a crowd, transmit the disease, and spread infected agents to local area subnetworks. The railway leads to a faster initial increase in infected agents and a higher steady state infection, and thus poses risks; and frequent traveling leads to a more severe infection. These features revealed in simulations are in agreement with analytic results of a simplified version of the model. Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013