A Blockchain-Enabled Participatory Decision Support Framework

Abstract

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 (VR) technologies make possible the development of participatory decision support frameworks. The concept is demonstrated in a public health context by implementing an Agent Based Model of disease spread within a simulated population (SIR model) as a so-called Smart Contract deployed on a public Blockchain network. We demonstrate that in order to “close the loop” the simulation outcomes can be visualized using commodity VR hardware, and future extensions towards fully interactive simulations are proposed.