A Blockchain-Enabled Participatory Decision Support Framework

In this “post truth” age of “fake news” and “alternative facts” uncertainty in the provenance of policy makes transparency in decision making increasingly important for evidence-based policymakers. This paper demonstrates how the convergence of Agent Based Modelling, Smart Contracts, Blockchain, and Virtual Reality technologies make possible the development of practical participatory decision support systems. An Agent Based Model of disease spread within a population (SIR model) is implemented as a so-called Smart Contract on a public Blockchain network. We demonstrate that in order to “close the loop” the simulation outcomes can be visualized using commodity hardware, and future extensions towards fully interactive participatory simulations are proposed