Towards Reusable Building Blocks to Develop COVID-19 Simulation Models

Modeling & Simulation has played an essential role in supporting the decision-making activities of policymakers for COVID-19. However, a proliferation of models has been noted in the literature, and new models are only more likely to emerge given the shift to long-term management of the disease and the call for highly tailored tools. Having a multiplicity of models can have benefits, for example when contributing to ensembles of models. However, if each model is created from scratch, there is significant redundancy in efforts hence time inefficiency and a heightened risk of bugs. Our study examines the naturally occurring practices of modelers who wrote COVID-19 models in NetLogo to identify redundancy in code and thus suggest reusable ‘building blocks’ that would speed-up the process of model development as well as improving code quality. Based on 28 models, we identified five themes and discussed their transformation into potential building blocks for simulation.