An In-Service Agent Monitoring and Analysis System

Multi Agent Systems (MAS) have been experimented in building a variety of applications. Several agent-building tools are available to assist the tasks of building agentbased systems. However the issues of how to visualize and monitor the behaviors, and to analyze the performance of in-service agents have largely not been addressed. This paper describes the system we have developed for visualizing, monitoring and analyzing MAS activities both on-line and off-line. Our system uses an agent-based infrastructure for scalability and flexibility in dealing with a variety of visualization, monitoring and analysis service requirements from agent-based application systems. The system includes: 1) an information management agent for collecting and storing data from MAS, and for making service agreements with application agent systems; 2) a visualization agent for constructing and presenting various views; and 3) an analysis agent for analyzing MAS performance and making recommendations with a view to optimize the performance of in-service agents.