Full-length conference Paper at The 2nd York Doctoral Symposium on Computer Science and Electronics

In the past, frequent movements and migration were studied separately in metapopulation models. The levels that exist in a hierarchical metapopulation model were also limited to two and only recently increased to multiple levels. Moreover, a generalisable deterministic model was not available. Here we introduce a novel model incorporating both movement scenarios as well as a multiple-level structure. We describe the system in simple diÆerential equation form. The simulations of diÆerent distributions of local contact rates for disease transmission suggest that local information is important for predicting disease dy- namics. The comparison between the results from a solely migration-based multilevel model and the model discussed in this paper suggests that diseases with low transmission rates can spread rapidly and infect a large number of susceptible individuals in a short time if they appear in a population where frequent movements are dominant. Keywords: multilevel system, patch-based system, disease modelling, epidemic, mathemat- ical epidemiology