How it Works¶
When you use CITAM to model your facility (e.g. a school, a manufacturing facility, an office building, etc.), it creates a “virtual” version of that facility and simulates the movement of individuals while keeping track of time and location of contact events as well as the individuals involved. You can vary different input parameters such as number of people, number of shifts and traffic patterns and compare the contact statistics to find the best mitigation strategy to limit transmission within your facility.
As a simulation platform, CITAM does not implement nor does it support real-world tracking of visitors, employees or other people within the facilities of interest. CITAM actually provides an alternative to that approach by allowing a simulation to be used to assess and understand the implications of various mitigation policies. At its core, CITAM is an agent-based modeling platform. However, CITAM implements special features that make it possible to mimic daily activities in various indoor environments.
The primary requirement to use CITAM is to have a map of each floor of each facility in SVG format for ingestion as well as some metadata about each space in each floorplan. For a list of required metadata, please visit the Simulation Input Requirements section of the documentation. Example input files are also available in the examples folder of the git repository.
Floorplans must be imported into CITAM before any simulation can be performed with them. This process is done in four easy steps (2 are required and 2 are optional) described below:
Ingestion (required): In this step, CITAM reads your SVG and CSV files, automatically adds doors to spaces where missing, removes map artifacts that are deemed unnecessary for the simulation, and stores the resulting data in your local cache for future retrieval.
Validation (optional): In this step, you get to inspect results from the ingestion step and make any necessary changes. This step is optional but highly recommended to ensure valid simulation results.
Navigation Network Creation (required): When you are happy with the quality of the ingested data, you use a simple command to build the navigation network (or navnet) for your facility. The navnet is used for intelligent navigation of individuals in your facility within the simulation (to know how to go from their office to a cafeteria for example).
Navigation Network Validation (optional): You can also verify and edit the navigation network to make sure everything looks good and ensure valid simulation results.
These steps are done only once for each floor of each facility.
Once a facility is successfully ingested into CITAM, any number of simulations can be performed with it. The parameters for each simulation are provided in an input file and include the number of individuals, the duration of the simulation, the contact distance, any one-way traffic, the number and characteristics of each shift if there are several, etc.
CITAM is built as a cross-platform software compatible with all major operating systems. The primary way of using CITAM is currently through the command-line. CITAM is also shipped with a web-based dashboard to visualize simulation results.
CITAM is available on GitHub.
We recommend going through the Tutorial for a more in-depth guide on how to use CITAM.