Fine-Grained Prediction and Control of Covid-19 Pandemic in a City: Application to Post-Initial Stages

Predicting the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic during its early phases was relatively easy as its dynamics were governed by few influencing factors that included a single dominant virus variant and the demographic characteristics of a given area. Several models based on a wide variety of techniques were developed for this purpose. Their prediction accuracy started deteriorating as the number of influencing factors and their interrelationships grew over time. With the pandemic evolving in a highly heterogeneous way across individual countries, states, and even individual cities, there emerged a need for a contextual and fine-grained understanding of the pandemic to come up with effective means of pandemic control. This paper presents a fine-grained model for predicting and controlling Covid-19 in a large city. Our approach borrows ideas from complex adaptive system-of-systems paradigm and adopts a concept of agent as the core modeling ion. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

System of Systems as a Solution to Mitigate the Spread of Covid-19

System of systems is a compilation of systems that focus on a specific task or a system by combining multiple resources to create complicated task-oriented or dedicated systems that combine their resources and skills to develop a new, more complicated system with higher capability and performance than the individual systems. The paper will define the System of Systems in terms of its architecture and the importance of having a System of System;then, it will define Covid-19's spread and effect on economics. After that, it will describe System of Systems in the medical sector as a case study in terms of mitigating Covid-19 and the challenges. Finally, the solutions are provided, where different applications can be combined to operate in real-time and assist the government agencies and medical staff in operating effectively.

Stakeholder Management in Digital Transformation: A System of Systems Approach

Major technological advances, globalization, geopolitical instability changes, and recent COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted organisations' increased reliance on rapidly evolving technology to maintain operations and deliver products and services as seamlessly as possible. Consequently, digital transformation has emerged as a key priority for organisations to effectively adopt rapidly evolving technology. Digital transformation requires many stakeholders working together to achieve a common objective of supporting the organisation through a fundamental change. Managing the stakeholders is then a critical challenge in the process. Stakeholders often have different viewpoints, which can be a potent opportunity for tapping into their shared collective intelligence to develop new ideas and solutions. However, successfully incorporating these diverse perspectives and also preserving emergent behaviour is a demanding task since no methodology currently exists to support such integration. This paper proposes a System of Systems approach to stakeholder management in digital transformation, where each stakeholder is recognized as an individual, autonomous, decentralized, and heterogeneous system with its own set of attributes while simultaneously being part of a larger collective whole, or SoS. By considering each stakeholder as a system within a greater SoS, emergent behaviour that is created through stakeholder interaction can be fostered and reinforced. Since the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, emergence generated as part of a collective interface of relevant stakeholders enables more holistic stakeholder integration and contributes to more effective governance. © 2022 IEEE.

Managing Pandemic Resilience with Other Cascading Disruptions of a Socio-Technical System

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred the development of methodologies to assess risk to economic development plans. To increase local recovery efforts, the federal government provides funding for regional economic development. Funds are allocated based on immediate needs as well as growth potential. This work advances the risk register methodology to prioritize infrastructure initiatives - potential projects, policies, or other actions an organization may take - while considering the influence of exogenous scenarios on priorities given the impact of COVID-19. The risk register identifies performance criteria which measure performance - for example, an initiative incentivizing restaurants to increase outdoor seating improves a create new jobs criterion. Next, the register identifies disruptive events and groups these events into scenarios. There are now two sets of data: the initiatives considered for implementations, and a set of disruptive scenarios, including a baseline. The register evaluates the impact of each scenario on each initiative. For each scenario, the initiative with greatest impact on performance criteria is ranked first, and so on for the remaining scenarios. These rankings mathematically capture the influence of each scenario on the priority of each initiative. The risk register mathematically quantifies the disruptiveness of each scenario, allowing the comparison of different disruptive events. This information can help determine how to allocate resources to improve system resilience. The risk register methodology is applied to a socio-technical system of systems. This work advances methods outlined in the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge, specifically the System of Systems knowledge area. © 2022 IEEE.

Collaborative Trusted Digital Services for Citizens

In modern society, citizens aspire to get trusted and reliable digital services to authenticate theirs to payments. With the COVID-19 crisis, online shopping’s fast growth has led citizens to increase registration in different systems. The registration is typically done without any guarantee that the involved business entity is trusted and that private data is managed adequately, namely according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). There are cases where online business adopts a federated authentication mechanism based on the existing and extensively adopted service providers, e.g., Facebook, and Google. With the European authorities’ complacency, this de facto trend seems to contribute to a dangerous unregulated digital services model. While avoiding the centralization risks, a possible alternative is to pursue the concept of regulated and competing digital online shops or services offered under a single collaborative model across Europe. Citizens aspire to get simple mechanisms based on a single provider for authentication and pay anywhere, even with some associated costs. In this direction, we propose a model that considers regulated providers managing citizens’ access to any online business in Europe, avoiding, in this way, the spreading of personal data across (business) organizations, thus decreasing the risk of personal data leaks. A collaborative network is foreseen to logically tie committed regulating authorities, providers, and digital online service providers. The proposed approach is ground on our previous research on systems integration, collaborative network infrastructure, and unified mobility payment services. This position paper offers a digital strategy for citizens, designated by Digital Person Ecosystem (DPE), which relies on Collaborative Networks concepts and centered on public authority leadership. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Systemic criticality-a new assessment concept improving the evidence basis for CI protection.

With high certainty, extreme weather events will intensify in their impact within the next 10 years due to climate change-induced increases in hazard probability of occurrence and simultaneous increases in socio-economic vulnerability. Data from previous mega-disasters show that losses from disruptions of critical services surpass the value of direct damages in the exposed areas because critical infrastructures [CI] are increasingly (inter-) dependent. Local events may have global impacts. Systemic criticality, which describes the relevance of a critical infrastructure due to its positioning within the system, needs to be addressed to reduce the likelihood of cascading effects. This paper presents novel approaches to operationalise and assess systemic criticality. Firstly, the paper introduces systemic cascade potential as a measurement of systemic criticality. It takes the relevance of a sector and the relevance of its interdependencies into account to generate a relative value of systemic importance for a CI sector. Secondly, an exemplary sectoral assessment of the road network allows reflecting the spatial manifestation of the first level of cascading effects. It analyses the impact of traffic interruptions on the accessibility of critical facilities to point out the systemically most critical segments of the municipal road network. To further operationalise the spatial dimension of criticality, a normative assertion determining the worthiness of protection of system components is required. A nationwide spatial flood protection plan incorporates this aspect in Germany for the first time. Its formal approval process was initiated in February 2020.