Eur. Phys. J. B (2016) 89: 26
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2015-60651-x

Regular Article

Modelling temporal networks of human face-to-face contacts with public activity and individual reachability^*

Adaptive Networks and Control Lab, Department of Electronic Engineering & Research Center of Smart Networks and Systems, School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, P.R. China

^a e-mail: lix@fudan.edu.cn

Received: 8 August 2015
Received in final form: 6 December 2015
Published online: 1 February 2016

Abstract

Modelling temporal networks of human face-to-face contacts is vital both for understanding the spread of airborne pathogens and word-of-mouth spreading of information. Although many efforts have been devoted to model these temporal networks, there are still two important social features, public activity and individual reachability, have been ignored in these models. Here we present a simple model that captures these two features and other typical properties of empirical face-to-face contact networks. The model describes agents which are characterized by an attractiveness to slow down the motion of nearby people, have event-triggered active probability and perform an activity-dependent biased random walk in a square box with periodic boundary. The model quantitatively reproduces two empirical temporal networks of human face-to-face contacts which are testified by their network properties and the epidemic spread dynamics on them.