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International audienceChagas disease is a vector-borne disease and a major public health concern in Latin America. To understand the disease dynamics, we investigated the influence of landscape heterogeneity and host diversity on pathogen transmission. We developed an epidemiological model based on the cellular automata approach to simulate the spread of Chagas disease in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments with competent and noncompetent hosts species. We show at first that weak levels of dispersal are associated with a reduction in infection as vectors infected in habitats of high transmission tend to spread into habitats with fewer hosts. A second important conclusion is that larger levels of dispersal can have very contrasted effects depending on the composition of the host community in the area of lower intrinsic transmission

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We study the problem of master-slave synchronization and control of totalistic cellular automata. The synchronization mechanism is that of setting a fraction of sites of the slave system equal to those of the master one (pinching synchronization). The synchronization observable is the distance between the two configurations. We present three control strategies that exploit local information (the number of nonzero first-order Boolean derivatives) in order to choose the sites to be synchronized. When no local information is used, we speak of simple pinching synchronization. We find the critical properties of control and discuss the best control strategy compared with simple synchronization.