Asgard Viewer
Monitoring the runtime behaviour of a distributed agent system for debugging or demonstration purposes provides a challenge to agent system developers. As a lot of the components in such a system are possibly executed on several different physical systems, maintaining an overview over the complete environment is extremely difficult. Methods taken from the development of monolithic software projects such as log files, debug outputs or step-by-step execution of a program do not easily translate to these scenarios due to the distributed nature of the system. “ASGARD” (Advanced Structured Graphical Agent Realm Display) provides an easy-to-use and intuitively understandable method for monitoring and demonstrating Multi-Agent System Infrastructures. ASGARD provides a graphical representation of the connected systems using a 3D visualization. The very promising results from empirical evaluation show that an administrator's overview over such MAS at runtime is vastly improved.
Features

- 3D visualization of the agent infrastructure
- Live view of the agents and agent nodes on the distributed platform
- Visualization of communications and migrations in the system
- Plug-in interface for specialized functionalities, e.g. system load
- Manipulation of agent states
- Drag & drop migration of agents
Publications
J. Tonn and S. Kaiser. ASGARD - a graphical monitoring tool for distributed agent infrastructures (to appear). In Proceedings of PAAMS 2010, April 2010.
S. Kaiser, M. Burkhardt and J. Tonn. Drag-and-Drop Migration: An Example of Mapping User Actions to Agent Infrastructures (to appear). ITMAS 2010, May 2010.


