A simple computational approach to the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemic model via the Laplace-Adomian Decomposition Method

Harko, Tiberiu; Mak, Man Kwong

The Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemic model is extensively used for the study of the spread of infectious diseases. Even that the exact solution of the model can be obtained in an exact parametric form, in order to perform the comparison with the epidemiological data a simple but highly accurate representation of the time evolution of the SIR compartments would be very useful. In the present paper we obtain a series representation of the solution of the SIR model by using the Laplace-Adomian Decomposition Method to solve the basic evolution equation of the model. The solutions are expressed in the form of infinite series. The series representations of the time evolution of the SIR compartments are compared with the exact numerical solutions of the model. We find that there is a good agreement between the Laplace-Adomian semianalytical solutions containing only three terms, and the numerical results.