FRED (A Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics) is an agent-based modeling system developed by the Pitt Public Health Dynamics Laboratory.
FRED represents every person in a real geographic region as a separate individual each with her/his own unique social, familial, demographic, behavioral, and health characteristics. Individuals interact within realistic household, school, and workplace social networks.
FRED was originally developed to simulate infectious disease epidemics, but has been extended to enable users to model a wide range of health conditions and to study how patterns of those conditions vary over time in a specific region.
FRED produces a lot of analyzable data that is then used for visualizations. This web interface provides those visualizations in an interactive way in the hopes of making large-scale agent-based models more useful to the policy-making community, the research community, and as a teaching tool for students in public health.
FRED has been used for a variety of projects. See our Simulations menu for links to various project visualizations.
If you use FRED in your research, please use the following citation: Grefenstette JJ, Brown ST, Rosenfeld R, Depasse J, Stone NT, Cooley PC, Wheaton WD, Fyshe A, Galloway DD, Sriram A, Guclu H, Abraham T, Burke DS. FRED (A Framework for Reconstructing Epidemic Dynamics): An open-source software system for modeling infectious diseases and control strategies using census-based populations. BMC Public Health, 2013 Oct;13(1), 940. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-13-940. PubMed PMID: 24103508
Support for this work is provided by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences under MIDAS grant 1U54GM088491-01, by the Vaccine Modeling Initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.