Interfaces for understanding multi-agent behavior

Abstract

Synchronized punch-card displays are an interface technique to visualize tens of thousands of variables by encoding their values as color chips in a rectangular array. Our technique ties multiple such displays to a timeline of events enabling the punch-card displays to show animations of the behavior of complex systems. Punch-card displays not only make it easy to understand the highlevel behavior of systems, but also enable users to quickly focus on individual variables and on fine-grained time intervals. This paper describes synchronized punch-card displays and shows how this technique is extremely powerful for understanding the behavior of complex multi-agent systems.

VizScript

“…Figure 1 shows shots of 5 out of 40 of the visualizations generated with VizScript for this particular application. The visualizations are generated using VizScript's embedded graphics library, which is an augmented version of the Starfields graphics package from previous work [19]. A full animation of the visualizations can be seen at [18].…”

Monitoring Group Behavior in Goal-Directed Agents Using Co-efficient Plan Observation

“…Programming of BDI-oriented aspects, demands an automated weaving process and aspect visualization to support traceability for developers 5 . An adoption if this notion in current BDI based development efforts may lead towards a more comprehensive examination how of aspect-oriented concepts, e. g. as defined in the meta-model described in [37], fit in this particular agent architecture.…”

“…Therefore, analysis and visualization tools have been developed [3,5,6,29]. These mainly rely on two mechanisms.…”

“…Up to date, a few facilities to monitor and visualize MAS (e.g. [3,4,5]) as well as individual agents [6] have been reported for this purpose. These allow developers to examine macroscopic and/or microscopic behaviors via simulations.…”