Health Certificate Exchange for Travel Management in Pandemic: Review and Perspectives

Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted regular off-line business activities. This unprecedented situation inspires the valuable research on facilitating off-line business under pandemics. In this article, we conceptualized the problem as travel management in pandemic (TMiP) and analyzed it from the technological perspective. Enabling travel in a pandemic not only needs a health certificate to prove that the traveler is safe but also entry/exit permissions from both the origin and the destination regions, determined by the local situation and measures. Thus, TMiP is related to technical, social, economic, and administrative factors. By conducting a review on the literature covering the health certificate technology, its adoption in practice, and the exchange system technology published during the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned about their usefulness and limitations in TMiP. Second, we analyzed the review outcomes to infer the six distinctive technical challenges of TMiP. Third, we analyzed the feasibility of referential solutions to these challenges and showed their applicability and limitations. Finally, we offered the perspectives on new TMiP solutions and concluded that they rely on adapting existing solutions, creating new ones, and integrating all of them. We also presented future research directions in a holistic view of TMiP technical solutions. Overall, the findings of the study will stimulate more research on a more coordinated, comprehensive, and intelligent TMiP solution. We also hope this article can help practitioners to restart economies in a pandemic.