Numerical solution of a modified epidemiological model for computer viruses

Abstract

Computer viruses are serious problems for individual and corporate computer systems, and thus many studies have investigated how to avoid their deleterious effects by creating anti-virus programs that act as vaccines in personal computers or strategic network nodes. An alternative approach to combat the propagation of viruses is establishing preventive policies based on the overall operation of a system, which can be modeled with population models similar to those used in epidemiological studies. In this study, we propose an approximate solution to computer viruses, which is a modified version of the Susceptible-Infected-Removed model. We use the shifted Chebyshev collocation method to solve the computer virus dynamical model. This method transforms the system of nonlinear differential equations and the given conditions into a matrix equation, which corresponds to a system of nonlinear algebraic equations. We also present some numerical results. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.