Modelling HIV/AIDS Epidemiological Complexity: A Scoping Review of Agent-Based Model and Their Application

To end AIDS epidemic by 2030 despite the new challenges brought by Covid-19, such as increasing poverty rates and inequalities, policies should be designed to deal with population heterogeneity and environmental changes. Bottom-up designs, such Agent-Based Model (ABM), have the potential to deal with such complexity. We performed a scoping review of ABM applications for the HIV epidemic to highlight the gaps and potentialities of such approach. We followed the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews to categorize their main aims, populations, and countries/regions under study. We also identified the main studies based on paper’s co-citation network. We found 73 articles that applied ABM to HIV. Most of the studies model Transmission Dynamics into key populations of US and South Africa. More recent studies use ABM to model PREP interventions and Racial Disparities. Overall, ABMs are still underused considering their potencialities, and should be applied more broadly to support the implementation of HIV/AIDS control interventions.