README

To compare the three Python packages - Mesa, AgentPy, and Melodie - we develop the same agent-based covid contagion model with all of them.

In the model, we make following assumptions regarding the infection in the population:

• Each agent has two attributes: health_state and age_group.
• We consider four health states numbered from 0 to 3, meaning "not infected", "infected", "recovered", and "dead", respectively.
• We consider two age groups numbered from 0 to 1, meaning "young" and "old", respectively. A young person has a higher probability to recover from infection, and an old person has a lower probability to recover from infection.
• A "not infected" person can be infected by a "infected" person. The probability is an exogenous parameter infection_prob. When 10% of the people are infected, we assume a "not infected" person has 0.1 probability to contact with a "infected" person, so the total infection probability is 0.1 $\times$ infection_prob.

In this document, we compared the three packages based on the example.