Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo, Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia para Sistemas Complexos, Avenida Prof. Luciano Gualberto, Travessa 3, no. 158, 05508-900 São Paulo, SP, Brazil
Copyright © 2010 José Roberto C. Piqueira. This is an open access article distributed under the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Compartmental epidemiological models have been developed since the 1920s and successfully applied to study the propagation of infectious diseases. Besides, due to their structure, in the 1960s an interesting version of these models was developed to clarify some aspects of rumor propagation, considering that spreading an infectious disease or disseminating
information is analogous phenomena. Here, in an analogy with the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Removed) epidemiological model, the ISS (Ignorant-Spreader-Stifler) rumor spreading model is studied. By using concepts from the Dynamical Systems Theory, stability of equilibrium points is established, according to propagation parameters and initial conditions. Some numerical experiments are conducted in order to validate the model.