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 with the tasks of building agent-based systems. However the issues on 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 in dealing with various service requirements from agent-based application systems concerning visualization monitoring and analysis. There are three types of agents: 1) an information management agent for collecting and storing data from MAS, and for making service agreements with MAS, 2) a visualization agent for constructing and presenting various views and 3) analysis agent for analyzing MAS activities and for making recommendations with a view to optimize the in-service agent performance.