Reopen Offline Business during a Pandemic? Characterization of Health Certificate Exchange for Human Movement Management

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly restricted the regular offline business activities. Nevertheless, as certain offline business activities are still indispensable, to conduct offline business under pandemic control becomes a valuable research question. This paper addressed this problem by studying business movement management based on health certificate exchange. We first observed three patterns of health certificate exchange multiplicity that serve as a basis for business movement management. Then, we reviewed published literature along two orthogonal directions, health certificates and exchange systems. We studied different health certificates published during the COVID-19 pandemic to identify the categories of health certificates and their characteristics. Meanwhile, we further studied different design paradigms and characteristics of health certificate exchange systems. Last, we mapped our findings on health certificate exchange into the four challenges of movement management systems in a pandemic, namely flexible controllability, scalable accessibility, adaptive reusability, and spatiotemporal traceability, and conceptualized how such the requirements should be achieved and a complete system should operate.