Human residential population distributions show patterns of higher density clustering around local services such as shops and places of employment, displaying characteristic length scales; Fourier transforms and spatial autocorrelation show the length scale between UK cities is around 45 km. We use integro-differential equations to model the spatio-temporal dynamics of population and service density under the assumption that they benefit from spatial proximity, captured via spatial weight kernels. The system tends towards a well-mixed homogeneous state or a spatial pattern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has immensely impacted the economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainability in human lives. Due to the scholars' increasing interest in responding to the urgent call for action against the pandemic, the literature of sustainability research considering COVID-19 consequences is very fragmented. Therefore, a comprehensive review of the COVID-19 implications for sustainability practices is still lacking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs a response to the urgent call for recovery actions against the COVID-19 crisis, this research aims to identify action priority areas post COVID-19 toward achieving the targets of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development launched by the United Nations (UN). This paper applies a mixed-method approach to map the post-COVID-19 SDGs targets on a fuzzy action priority surface at the country level in Iran, as a developing country, by taking the following four main steps: (1) using a modified Delphi method to make a list of the SDGs targets influenced by COVID-19; (2) using the best-worst method, as a multi-criteria decision-making tool, to weight the COVID-19 effects on the SDGs targets achievement; also (3) to weight the impact of the SDGs targets on the sustainable development implementation; and finally (4) designing a fuzzy inference system to calculate the action priority scores of the SDGs targets. As a result, reduction of poor people proportion by half (SDG 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe importance of accounting for social and behavioural processes when studying public health emergencies has been well-recognised. For infectious disease outbreaks in particular, several methods of incorporating individual behaviour have been put forward, but very few are based on established psychological frameworks. In this paper, we develop a decision framework based on the COM-B model of behaviour change to investigate the impact of individual decision-making on public health outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdvances in healthcare and in the quality of life significantly increase human life expectancy. With the aging of populations, new un-faced challenges are brought to science. The human body is naturally selected to be well-functioning until the age of reproduction to keep the species alive.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is great potential to be explored regarding the use of agent-based modelling and simulation as an alternative paradigm to investigate early-stage cancer interactions with the immune system. It does not suffer from some limitations of ordinary differential equation models, such as the lack of stochasticity, representation of individual behaviours rather than aggregates and individual memory. In this paper we investigate the potential contribution of agent-based modelling and simulation when contrasted with stochastic versions of ODE models using early-stage cancer examples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany advances in research regarding immuno-interactions with cancer were developed with the help of ordinary differential equation (ODE) models. These models, however, are not effectively capable of representing problems involving individual localisation, memory and emerging properties, which are common characteristics of cells and molecules of the immune system. Agent-based modelling and simulation is an alternative paradigm to ODE models that overcomes these limitations.
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