The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic posed an unprecedented challenged to decision makers in politics and the health care system. The primary goal was to keep the number of critical cases below the limits of the health care system, and hence ensure medical care for the population. To achieve this extreme measures up to a total lockdown have been taken - with corresponding social and economic side effects.
Due to its expertise and long-lasting research, in cooperation with dwh GmbH and TU Wien, the research platform DEXHELPP has the tools (amongst others GEPOC and the ABT-framework and the know-how to evaluate the efficiency and effects of single measures as well as of packages of countermeasures. It is also possible to also calculate their impact on the health care system to assess the limits of resources. Thanks to this expertise Austrian decision makers were provided with a solid basis for their decisions.
Research projects
Advisory activity
Documents and scientific publications
Scientific publications
- Preprint of publication on evaluation of tracing policies, currently undergoing review process: M. Bicher,C. Rippinger, C. Urach, D. Brunmeir, N. Popper, “Agent-Based Simulation for Evaluation of Contact-Tracing Policies Against the Spread of SARS-CoV-2”. doi: 10.1101/2020.05.12.20098970.
- F. Miksch, B. Jahn, K. J. Espinosa, J. Chhatwal, U. Siebert, and N. Popper, “Why should we apply ABM for decision analysis for infectious diseases?—An example for dengue interventions”, PLoS ONE, vol. 14, no. 8, p. e0221564, Aug. 2019, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0221564.
- Publikation of population model GEPOC which is a foundation of the COVID-19 model: M. Bicher, C. Urach, & N. Popper “GEPOC ABM: A generic agent-based population model for Austria”, in Proceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference, 2018, pp. 2656-2667. doi: 10.1109/WSC.2018.8632170.
- G. Schneckenreither and N. Popper, “Dynamic multiplex social network models on multiple time scales for simulating contact formation and patterns in epidemic spread”, in Proceedings of the 2017 Winter Simulation Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2017, pp. 4324–4335.