A Cloud-Based Collaboration Platform for Model-Based Design of Cyber-Physical Systems

Businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, aiming to start up in Model-Based Design (MBD) face difficult choices from a wide range of methods, notations and tools before making the significant investments in planning, procurement and training necessary to deploy new approaches successfully. In the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) this is exacerbated by the diversity of formalisms covering computation, physical and human processes. In this paper, we propose the use of a cloud-enabled and open collaboration platform that allows businesses to offer models, tools and other assets, and permits others to access these on a pay-per-use basis as a means of lowering barriers to the adoption of MBD technology, and to promote experimentation in a sandbox environment

Genomic reconstruction of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England.

The evolution of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus leads to new variants that warrant timely epidemiological characterization. Here we use the dense genomic surveillance data generated by the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium to reconstruct the dynamics of 71 different lineages in each of 315 English local authorities between September 2020 and June 2021. This analysis reveals a series of subepidemics that peaked in early autumn 2020, followed by a jump in transmissibility of the B.1.1.7/Alpha lineage. The Alpha variant grew when other lineages declined during the second national lockdown and regionally tiered restrictions between November and December 2020. A third more stringent national lockdown suppressed the Alpha variant and eliminated nearly all other lineages in early 2021. Yet a series of variants (most of which contained the spike E484K mutation) defied these trends and persisted at moderately increasing proportions. However, by accounting for sustained introductions, we found that the transmissibility of these variants is unlikely to have exceeded the transmissibility of the Alpha variant. Finally, B.1.617.2/Delta was repeatedly introduced in England and grew rapidly in early summer 2021, constituting approximately 98% of sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes on 26 June 2021