Supply chains are fundamental to the economic functioning of society, through the assembly and transport of essential goods such as food, clothes and medicine. Technological advancements have driven supply chains to become increasingly automated, to optimise for efficiency and cost, and to respond to disturbances. However, optimising for social concerns is less prevalent. Increasing consumer preferences towards purchasing goods whose production is more aligned with those consumers’ values (such as sustainability), requires values-management capabilities within supply chain software. Such capabilities include tracing, monitoring, and verifying values-alignment between end-consumers and stakeholders. In this paper, we advocate for adaptive values-alignment between end-consumers and stakeholders in cyber-physical supply chains. We motivate this by means of an example of a coffee supply chain, which in turn surfaces social and technical challenges to values-alignment. We then propose a distributed, locally adaptive values-alignment approach. We implement this approach within a software framework and quantitatively illustrate its impact in increasing alignment from two competing perspectives: supply chain stakeholders and end-consumers. We show that end-consumer bias performs better by reducing values-misalignment by up to 85

Supply chain fraud involving counterfeit or adulterated products presents threats to human health and safety. Quality inspection is a key fraud mitigation tool where inspection planning involves allocating inspection resources across geographically dispersed assets considering both the cost and value of the inspection. I4.0 environments pose further challenges as their heterogeneous and dynamic cyber-physical environment creates a large inspection resource allocation solution space, causing the corresponding analysis to be computationally complex. In this article, we contribute to supporting optimal inspection decisions of dynamic cyber-physical supply chains through the use of structural representations-topologies of the supply chain, physical premises, and their production context. We present an approach for topology modeling of supply chains and illustrate its use within an adaptive inspection approach, showing that structural information can reduce malicious process discovery times by up to 90%.

BACKGROUND:Digital Contact Tracing is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of Covid-19. But it requires high uptake and continued participation across the population to be effective. To achieve sufficient uptake/participation, health authorities should address, and thus be aware of, user concerns.AIM:This work manually analyzes user reviews of the Irish Heath Service Executive's (HSE) Contact Tracker app, to identify user concerns and to lay the foundations for subsequent, large-scale, automated analyses of reviews. While this might seem tightly scoped to the Irish context, the HSE app provides the basis for apps in many jurisdictions in the USA and Europe.METHODS:Manual analysis of (1287) user reviews from the Google/Apple playstores was performed, to identify the aspects of the app that users focused on, and the positive/negative sentiment expressed.RESULTS:The findings suggest a largely positive sentiment towards the app, and that users thought it handled data protection and transparency aspects well. But feedback suggests that users would appreciate more targeted feedback on the incidence of the virus, and facilities for more proactive engagement, like notifications that prompt users to submit their health status daily. Finally, the analysis suggests that the "android battery" issue and the backward-compatibility issue with iPhones seriously impacted retention/uptake of the app respectively.CONCLUSION:The HSE have responded to the public's desire for targeted feedback in newer versions, but should consider increasing the app's proactive engagement. The results suggest they should also raise the backward compatibility issue, regarding older iPhones, with Apple.

Objective This study aims to gather public opinion on the Irish “COVID Tracker” digital contact tracing (DCT) App, with particular focus on App usage, usability, usefulness, technological issues encountered, and potential changes to the App. Methods A 35-item online questionnaire was deployed for 10 days in October 2020, 3 months after the launch of the Irish DCT App. Results A total of 2889 completed responses were recorded, with 2553 (88%) respondents currently using the App. Although four in five users felt the App is easy to download, is easy to use and looks professional, 615 users (22%) felt it had slowed down their phone, and 757 (28%) felt it had a negative effect on battery life. Seventy-nine percent of respondents reported the App's main function is to aid contact tracing. Inclusion of national COVID-19 trends is a useful ancillary function according to 87% of respondents, and there was an appetite for more granular local data. Overall, 1265 (44%) respondents believed the App is helping the national effort, while 1089 (38%) were unsure. Conclusions DCT Apps may potentially augment traditional contact tracing methods. Despite some reports of negative effects on phone performance, just 7% of users who have tried the App have deleted it. Ancillary functionality, such as up-to-date regional COVID-19, may encourage DCT App use. This study describes general positivity toward the Irish COVID Tracker App among users but also highlights the need for transparency on effectiveness of App-enabled contact tracing and for study of non-users to better establish barriers to use.

Background The silent transmission of COVID-19 has led to an exponential growth of fatal infections. With over 4 million deaths worldwide, the need to control and stem transmission has never been more critical. New COVID-19 vaccines offer hope. However, administration timelines, long-term protection, and effectiveness against potential variants are still unknown. In this context, contact tracing and digital contact tracing apps (CTAs) continue to offer a mechanism to help contain transmission, keep people safe, and help kickstart economies. However, CTAs must address a wide range of often conflicting concerns, which make their development/evolution complex. For example, the app must preserve citizens’ privacy while gleaning their close contacts and as much epidemiological information as possible. Objective In this study, we derived a compare-and-contrast evaluative framework for CTAs that integrates and expands upon existing works in this domain, with a particular focus on citizen adoption; we call this framework the Citizen-Focused Compare-and-Contrast Evaluation Framework (C3EF) for CTAs. Methods The framework was derived using an iterative approach. First, we reviewed the literature on CTAs and mobile health app evaluations, from which we derived a preliminary set of attributes and organizing pillars. These attributes and the probing questions that we formulated were iteratively validated, augmented, and refined by applying the provisional framework against a selection of CTAs. Each framework pillar was then subjected to internal cross-team scrutiny, where domain experts cross-checked sufficiency, relevancy, specificity, and nonredundancy of the attributes, and their organization in pillars. The consolidated framework was further validated on the selected CTAs to create a finalized version of C3EF for CTAs, which we offer in this paper. Results The final framework presents seven pillars exploring issues related to CTA design, adoption, and use: (General) Characteristics, Usability, Data Protection, Effectiveness, Transparency, Technical Performance, and Citizen Autonomy. The pillars encompass attributes, subattributes, and a set of illustrative questions (with associated example answers) to support app design, evaluation, and evolution. An online version of the framework has been made available to developers, health authorities, and others interested in assessing CTAs. Conclusions Our CTA framework provides a holistic compare-and-contrast tool that supports the work of decision-makers in the development and evolution of CTAs for citizens. This framework supports reflection on design decisions to better understand and optimize the design compromises in play when evolving current CTAs for increased public adoption. We intend this framework to serve as a foundation for other researchers to build on and extend as the technology matures and new CTAs become available.

Background Digital contact tracing apps have the potential to augment contact tracing systems and disrupt COVID-19 transmission by rapidly identifying secondary cases prior to the onset of infectiousness and linking them into a system of quarantine, testing, and health care worker case management. The international experience of digital contact tracing apps during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how challenging their design and deployment are. Objective This study aims to derive and summarize best practice guidance for the design of the ideal digital contact tracing app. Methods A collaborative cross-disciplinary approach was used to derive best practice guidance for designing the ideal digital contact tracing app. A search of the indexed and gray literature was conducted to identify articles describing or evaluating digital contact tracing apps. MEDLINE was searched using a combination of free-text terms and Medical Subject Headings search terms. Gray literature sources searched were the World Health Organization Institutional Repository for Information Sharing, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control publications library, and Google, including the websites of many health protection authorities. Articles that were acceptable for inclusion in this evidence synthesis were peer-reviewed publications, cohort studies, randomized trials, modeling studies, technical reports, white papers, and media reports related to digital contact tracing. Results Ethical, user experience, privacy and data protection, technical, clinical and societal, and evaluation considerations were identified from the literature. The ideal digital contact tracing app should be voluntary and should be equitably available and accessible. User engagement could be enhanced by small financial incentives, enabling users to tailor aspects of the app to their particular needs and integrating digital contact tracing apps into the wider public health information campaign. Adherence to the principles of good data protection and privacy by design is important to convince target populations to download and use digital contact tracing apps. Bluetooth Low Energy is recommended for a digital contact tracing app's contact event detection, but combining it with ultrasound technology may improve a digital contact tracing app's accuracy. A decentralized privacy-preserving protocol should be followed to enable digital contact tracing app users to exchange and record temporary contact numbers during contact events. The ideal digital contact tracing app should define and risk-stratify contact events according to proximity, duration of contact, and the infectiousness of the case at the time of contact. Evaluating digital contact tracing apps requires data to quantify app downloads, use among COVID-19 cases, successful contact alert generation, contact alert receivers, contact alert receivers that adhere to quarantine and testing recommendations, and the number of contact alert receivers who subsequently are tested positive for COVID-19. The outcomes of digital contact tracing apps' evaluations should be openly reported to allow for the wider public to review the evaluation of the app. Conclusions In conclusion, key considerations and best practice guidance for the design of the ideal digital contact tracing app were derived from the literature.

This paper reports on the progress in the project COVIGILANT, which is aimed at developing an evaluation taxonomy for Contact Tracing Applications (CTAs) for COVID-19 Specifically, this article describes the development of Usability, one pillar of the COVIGILANT taxonomy, discussing the classification and decision-making processes, and the initial model validation The validation process was undertaken in two stages First, we validated how the Usability pillar could be used to evaluate the Irish Health Services Executive (HSE) COVID-19 CTA While this supported many of the attributes that we had within the Usability pillar, it also identified issues We made amendments based on these, and undertook a second study, this time evaluating 4 CTAs used in other countries This has led to the completion of the Usability pillar, which can now be used to evaluate global CTAs Copyright © 2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda All rights reserved

Novel software applications (“Apps”) that can potentially simplify the laborious work of manual contact tracing during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are a tempting prospect. Given this potential, many countries have designed, developed and deployed Apps before their efficacy has been established. The Irish health service launched the “COVID Tracker” App on the 7th July 2020 and 8 months later it is being used by 35% of those over 16 in Ireland. Conduct a national survey with a large sample of the Irish population to gather public opinion of the COVID Tracker App and its contribution to the national COVID-19 response. A 37-item questionnaire deployed online for 10 days in early October 2020. There were 2,889 complete responses to the survey. Responses were received from all 26 counties in the Republic of Ireland and the cohort was younger, more female-predominant and had higher educational attainment than the population. Of the 2,889 respondents, 2,741 (95%) had downloaded the App at some point, while 2,553 (88%) were still using it. For the 188 respondents who had stopped using the App, 116 respondents (62%) reported battery related concerns. For the 2,741 participants who had downloaded the App at some point, 2,374 (87%) reported the App was easy to use and 2,250 (82%) agreed it looked professional and of high quality. Regarding the main function of the App, 2,333 (81%) felt this was clear, and 92% of these App users stated the main function was to assist contact tracing. Overall, 1,265 (44%) respondents stated they believe the App is helping the national effort, while 1,089 (38%) were unsure. Younger respondents, female respondents, those in low-risk groups and those less worried about COVID-19 and were more negative about the clarity of the App’s main function and its usefulness. Contact tracing Apps have the potential to augment traditional contact tracing methods. Our research describes general positivity toward the Irish COVID Tracker App but also highlights the need for users to be updated regularly on its effectiveness. While the effectiveness of digital contact tracing is difficult to ascertain, all countries using contact tracing Apps must strive to ensure citizens are clear on any contribution such Apps are making to the pandemic response. Data describing how many notified users were already aware of their recent close contact with an infected case, and if the warning actually prevented people mixing, would constitute objective evidence of the impact these Apps are having, which may in turn improve their adoption and consequent usefulness. n/a

Providing resilience, the notion of persistence service delivery in the face of challenges to operation, is seen as increasingly vital with the continued evolution of service-delivery paradigms such as Fog and Edge operating in hostile and uncertain environments. Additionally, to achieve resilience in these environments, a number of unconventional system and network architectures have been produced, which also require novel methods of resilience evaluation. Using a novel bio-inspired embryonic fog service delivery platform, we evaluate a number of graph resilience metrics and propose a new method using assortativity to evaluate the state of service fluctuations over time.

Software systems are increasingly making decisions on behalf of humans, raising concerns about the fairness of such decisions. Such concerns are usually attributed to flaws in algorithmic design or biased data, but we argue that they are often the result of a lack of explicit specification of fairness requirements. However, such requirements are challenging to elicit, a problem exacerbated by increasingly dynamic environments in which software systems operate, as well as stakeholders' changing needs. Therefore, capturing all fairness requirements during the production of software is challenging, and is insufficient for addressing software changes post deployment. In this paper, we propose adaptive fairness as a means for maintaining the satisfaction of changing fairness requirements. We demonstrate how to combine requirements-driven and resource-driven adaptation in order to address variabilities in both fairness requirements and their associated resources. Using models for fairness requirements, resources, and their relations, we show how the approach can be used to provide systems owners and end-users with capabilities that reflect adaptive fairness behaviours at runtime. We demonstrate our approach using an example drawn from shopping experiences of citizens. We conclude with a discussion of open research challenges in the engineering of adaptive fairness in human-facing software systems.

Cloud infrastructures are highly favoured as a computing delivery model worldwide, creating a strong societal dependence. It is therefore vital to enhance their resilience, providing persistent service delivery under a variety of conditions. Cloud environments are highly complex and continuously evolving. Additionally, the plethora of use-cases ensures requirements for persistent service delivery vary. As a contribution to knowledge, this work surveys resilience techniques for cloud environments. We apply a novel perspective using a layered model of traditional and emerging cloud paradigms. Works are then classified according to the Resilinets model. For each layer, the most common techniques with limitations are derived including an actor’s strength in influencing resilience in the cloud with each technique. We conclude with some future challenges to the field of resilient cloud computing.

Cloud infrastructures are highly favoured as a computing delivery model worldwide, creating a strong societal dependence. It is therefore vital to enhance their resilience, providing persistent service delivery under a variety of conditions. Cloud environments are highly complex and continuously evolving. Additionally, the plethora of use-cases ensures requirements for persistent service delivery vary. As a contribution to knowledge, this work surveys resilience techniques for cloud environments. We apply a novel perspective using a layered model of traditional and emerging cloud paradigms. Works are then classified according to the Resilinets model. For each layer, the most common techniques with limitations are derived including an actor’s strength in influencing resilience in the cloud with each technique. We conclude with some future challenges to the field of resilient cloud computing.

Background: Contact tracing remains a critical part of controlling the spread of COVID-19. Many countries have developed novel software applications (Apps) in an effort to augment traditional contact tracing methods. Aim: To conduct a national survey of the Irish population to examine barriers and levers to the use of a contact tracing App.Methods: Adult participants were invited to respond via an online survey weblink sent via email and messaging Apps and posted on our university website and on popular social media platforms. Results: A total of 8,088 responses were received, with all 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland represented. 54% of respondents said they would definitely download a contact tracing App, while 30% said they would probably download a contact tracing App. 95% of respondents identified at least one reason for them to download the App, with the most common reasons being the potential for the App to help family members and friends and a sense of responsibility to the wider community. 59% identified at least one reason not to download the App, with the most common reasons being fear that technology companies or the government might use the App technology for greater surveillance after the pandemic.Conclusion: Irish citizens surveyed express high levels of willingness to download a public health-backed App to augment contact tracing. Concerns raised regarding privacy and data security will be critical if the App is to achieve the large-scale adoption and ongoing use required for its effective operation.

Contact Tracing (CT) is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of viruses, such as Covid-19. Given near ubiquitous societal usage of mobile devices, governments globally are choosing to augment manual CT with CT applications (CTAs) on smart phones. While a plethora of solutions have been spawned, their overall effectiveness is based on majority population uptake. Unfortunately, their rapid deployment and the nature of the information they gather has prompted a variety of user concerns such as information privacy and Data Protection (DP). Therefore selecting an optimal solution to maximise user trust and uptake is crucial. In this work, we present our initial deliberations towards a CTA evaluation taxonomy for societal concerns. This is a subset of a larger taxonomy which is being developed as part of the Science Foundation Ireland project - COVIGILANT, which will ultimately be utilized to evaluate and compare numerous CTAs to select the optimal solution for a given population. In this paper we present our preliminary CTAs with respect to the societal concerns of security, data protection and transparency. We then elaborate on these CTAs by means of two illustrative examples in order to promote discussion, evaluation and refinement.

With the pervasive introduction of Internet of Everything (IoE) technologies, use cases are frequently being found operating within harsh environmental conditions. This decreases the need for solutions that permit service delivery to operate in a highly resilient manner. This paper presents an architecture for a novel cloud platform designed for resilient service delivery. It supports networks where poor communication links or high node failure will cause services to be delivered in an nonresilient manner. This could be the result of factors such as high node mobility, poor environmental conditions, and unreliable infrastructure from environment disaster or cyber-attack. This biologically inspired architecture uses a purely distributed multiagent approach to provide self-healing and self-organizing properties, modeled on the characteristics of embryonic development and biological cell communication. To permit high levels of a node churn, this multiagent approach uses local-only communication. Probabilistic cellular automata are used to simulate this architecture and evaluate the efficacy of this approach.

Testing is a vital component of the system development life cycle. As information systems infrastructure move from native computing to cloud-based and virtualized platforms, it becomes necessary to evaluate their effectiveness to ensure completion of organizational goals. However, the complexity and scale of virtualized environments make this process difficult. Additionally, inherited and novel issues further complicate this process, while relatively high costs can be constraining. Enabling service-driven environments to provide this evaluation is therefore beneficial for both providers and users. No such complete service offering currently exists. This paper is therefore aimed to benefit industry and academia involved in areas involved with cloud-based testing of virtualized software and its environments. A review of current literature highlights a number of challenges in the domain. An analysis of the challenges aided in deriving requirements for developing a servitization framework for virtual infrastructure testing as a service. It is anticipated that this framework can further feedback into developing solutions to the aforementioned challenges. An evaluation of a real-world organization's servitization requirements case scenario indicates that the proposed framework provides potential solutions for associated use cases.

The resilience of distributed information systems has become a greater necessity as a support for both critical infrastructure and everyday use. This work focuses on ensuring the continued resilience of these systems through inspiration from resilient biological processes. In particular, the embryonic developmental processes are modelled and an architecture for self-healing cloud computing PaaS is developed in its likeness. This architecture is resilient through a purely distributed nature and autonomic attributes of self-healing and self-organisation.

SummaryWith mobile computing being the number one user paradigm of choice, and cloud computing becoming the chosen supporting infrastructure, the aggregation of these two areas is inevitable. Yet due to their novelty, they suffer from both inherited and new issues. Social computing theory can apply well to this fusion, such as pooling together in a social model to create ad hoc mobile clouds or by providing a greater functionality for mobile devices through resource augmentation from an external cloud. However, due to the highly contested resources within this setting, these resources must be negotiated within a social context. This paper argues that the application of social models to mobile cloud computing can allow mobile devices to employ cooperative strategies for resource sharing to allow aspects such as energy and costs to be minimised. Social computing is the means of using computing resources to augment human intelligence, mobiles can provide these enhancements to social intelligences but in a peer‐to‐peer manner. This paper proposes the design of a novel system which employs aggregated user and application resource profiling, in order to determine the most optimal place to process data, locally or on a remote cloud. Negotiation with the local cloud will then find a balance between optimum energy and resource utilisation.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. However the heterogeneous nature of devices and protocols in use, the sensitivity of the data contained within, as well as the legal and privacy issues, make security for the IoT a growing research priority and industry concern. With many security practices being unsuitable due to their resource intensive nature, it is deemed important t...

The development of resilient distributed systems is seen as essential to maintaining stable business and state-run processes due to information systems now underpinning most aspects of society. Cloud computing is now one of the most pervasive usage paradigms and due its novelty, research surrounding its resilience is largely lacking and often varied in terms of developed solutions. Therefore this paper provides an up-to-date review of resilience work in cloud computing. This includes methods of measuring and evaluating resilience, solutions for enabling resilience and alternative architectures developed with a focus upon ensuring resilience from the ground up. Firstly, resilience is defined within the context of cloud computing in order to categorise the work appropriately.