Application Background: Tobacco Control Policy

• Goal /Aspiration for Project
• Capability to fully analyze tobacco-related policies for the purpose of reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with tobacco use. This can include assessment of direct and cascading consequences of potential policies, generation of new and creative methods, and potential engineering of the CASoS.
• Approach/Methods/Models:
• The CASoS Engineering Framework guides the project, including identification of essential tobacco system components, processes, relationships, and interactions, and development of a flexible and dynamic modeling framework for analyzing the effects of potential tobacco-related policies on population health and mortality. This framework will simulate the complex systems involved in tobacco regulation, including:
• Impact of educational messages
• Consumer initiation, use, cessation, and relapse
• Non-user perceptions and behaviors
• Morbidity and mortality associated with tobacco product use
• The relative efficacy of combinations of possible courses of action will be assessed with regard to population harm or benefit. Because the landscape of tobacco regulation will continue to evolve in coming years, the structure of the modeling framework is being developed to allow rapid adaptation and incorporation of new data as they become available.
• The modeling framework represents tobacco use behaviors (by, for example, age, socioeconomic group, and demographics), control policies, products, advertising, and possible adaptations. Multiple viewpoints, scales, and approaches are necessary for capturing various aspects of the problem space. We are using a multi-modeling approach for integrated analysis that includes:
• System Dynamics stock and flow models
• Individual-Based / Agent-Based models
• Game Theoretic models
• Models of Innovation
• Status, Accomplishments and Next Steps
• Initiated in May 2010, this work is part of a 5-year program. Definition of a conceptual model of the components of tobacco product manufacture, marketing, and use has led to development of a computational framework for analyzing impacts of changes in tobacco use on population health over long periods of time. This includes a theoretical and computational framework for analyzing individual tobacco-use behaviors as influenced by a social network. Uncertainty quantification techniques and sensitivity analyses are used to assess the robustness of modeling results.
• CASoS Goals: General Capabilities
• This builds upon earlier CASoS epidemiology work in assessing the spread of an infectious disease through a networked population. The tobacco project generalizes this capability to the spread of other phenomena such as ideas or habits, and expands breadth and depth of CASoS work in the policy arena.
• CASoS Goals: Other Potential Applications
• There is a growing set of potential health policy applications related to epidemics. An epidemic can refer to the spread of an infectious disease, but often health-related issues, such as suicide, emotion, diet, and propensity to exercise, result from the spread of a change in perception of normative behaviors.  A health epidemic such as obesity is part of a complex set of technical, social, and economic systems. As social networks proliferate through the use of online media, the contagious nature of behaviors will become increasingly important.