Internship Topic: Development of a Web Extension for Multi-Agent eXperimenter

Context

Bitcoin, introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto, is the philosophical core of decentralized transactional systems that implement various blockchain protocols (e.g., Ethereum, Tendermint, Parity). Participants following such protocols can create together a distributed, economic, social and technical system where anyone can join and leave. Due to this openness of blockchain systems, it is not trivial to study their properties and tools allowing quantitative studies are needed.

To this end, since 2018, the Laboratory of Intelligent, Intelligent and Self-Organizing Information Systems (LICIA) is developing an agent-based modular simulation framework, called Multi-Agent eXperimenter (MAX), that enables rapid prototyping of industrial cases and realizes feasibility analysis in a realistic manner. MAX simulates complex experiments involving a large number of agents of different types acting in one or more blockchain systems. Blockchain developers could build models in the security of their own environment, while giving them the ability to test their algorithms more realistically and improve the quality of their own execution. By recreating system dynamics at the agent level, the impact of actions performed by an algorithm under different scenarios can be tested and analyzed more accurately. MAX runs as a standard Java graphics application and to allow a greater number of users, a prototype web portal has been created based on the JHispter framework .

Objective

The objective of this internship is to develop a web extension for the Multi-Agent eXperimenter (MAX) platform.

To this end, an agile methodology will be set up and firstly the specifications related to the functionalities of the web portal will be defined. Next, a series of REST services that allow defining and executing blockchain simulation experiments using the agent-based abstraction will be developed. To create dashboards to visualize the data the ELK Stack will be used. Finally, the practicality of the web extension will be demonstrated on a payment system the access of simulation services, such as the smart-contract audit platform myThx8, and on the other hand to notarize the results of a MAX simulation directly in a blockchain, such as Ethereum.