RIASSUNTO
Aquaculture is about to revolutionize the way we consume fish and other marine food products. However, emergent diseases continue to be a serious challenge to the aquaculture industry and set constraints to its expansion. Most models which describing the spread of disease are based on the assumption that populations are homogeneous and focus on the population as a whole. In this paper, we present an agent-based model that simulates the spread of an infectious in an aquaculture facility. We simulate both fishes and pathogens as individual agents that interact with each-other and their environment. This gives the model the capability to overcome the limitations of classical population-based models, permitting to study specific spatial aspects of the spread of infectious and addressing naturally stochastic nature of the infectious process. The model enables us to study the sensitivity to factors such as fish density, infectious radius, shedding rate, etc., in which the infectious disease takes place. The model experiment is designed to explore the impact of fish density and infectious radius factors on the fish disease dynamics. Exploring the sensitivity of fish disease dynamics to these factors helps in combatting these diseases. The model and its results are presented in this paper.