MATE: An Experiment While You Sleep Test Bed

Collaboration among design systems is rapidly becoming a focus of research in automated design (Klein 1992) (Lander and Lesser 1992) (Maher et. al. 1993 ). The construction collaborative design systems involves issues relating to the integration of heterogeneous databases and tools, multi-user interfaces, and design documentation, as well as issues of interagent communication and coordination. Here we focus on tools for exploring issues related to communication and coordination during the design, construction, and evaluation of collaborative design systems. The Multi-Agent Test Environment, MATE, is an "experiment while you sleep," test environment that performs the task of network resource allocation, experiment initiation, monitoring and termination, and archival of experimental results. It was developed over the course of three DAI projects, and has proven to be invaluable in the experimental development and evaluation of collaborative problem solving systems.