ASGARD – A Graphical Monitoring Tool for Distributed Agent Infrastructures
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. In this paper we describe our concept for a graphical monitoring and management tool “ASGARD” (Advanced Structured Graphical Agent Realm Display), which 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.