In this paper we present the plan, motivation, background, and the design of an agent-based
simulation framework describing the spread of Hospital-Associated Infections (HAIs).
We are developing a general simulation environment that is able to model wide range
of pathogen transmission scenarios in hospital environment. The elements of the simulation
include among others: admission and discharge patients, pathogen transmission via
healthcare workers, colonization and infection, modelling hospital events, scheduling
treatments, the interventions against HAI spreading. The evolution of the model is
tracked in discrete time, and the simulation is driven by stochastic events sampled
from predefined distributions. Our aim is to build a general, customisable and extensible
simulation environment for the domain of HAIs, therefore the presented design is in
Object-Oriented fashion. We implement the system in R using S4 classes, although the
design is general. The results of the simulations are time series and transmission
networks.
