Simpact is an agent based model (ABM) to study the way an infection spreads and can be influenced, and is currently focused on HIV and HIV-HSV2 co-infection. Simpact uses a continuous timeframe and is event-based: the state of the simulation world is updated every time an event takes place.

A more in-depth overview of SIMPACT’s features can be found here.

To support a range of technical calculations related to various aspects of planning, and analysing data from, major surveys designed to estimate HIV incidence (i.e. the rate of occurrence of new infections), SACEMA workers and collaborators have developed an ‘R Package’ inctools which is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). This is the canonical way that the R community distributes stable packages to share functionality, and it is the heart and soul of the R coding environment. The key underlying theoretical framework which is implemented in inctools was also developed inhouse at SACEMA over the last decade.

The inctools page at CRAN is here.