Advances in Agent Oriented Software Engineering have focused on the provision of frameworks and toolkits to aid in the creation of Multi Agent Systems (MASs). However, despite the need to address the inherent complexity of such systems, little progress has been made in the development of tools to allow for the debugging and understanding of their inner workings. This paper introduces a novel performance analysis system, named AgentSpotter, which facilitates such analysis. AgentSpotter was developed by mapping conventional profiling concepts to the domain of MASs. We outline its integration into the Agent Factory multi agent framework.
Unique amongst all of the mainstream MAS development platforms, Cougaar is alone in integrating a performance measurement infrastructure directly into the system architecture @cite_4 . Although this is not applicable to other platforms, it does provide a good insight into the features that MAS developers could reasonably expect from any performance measurement application. The principal characteristics of this structure are as follows: Primary data channels consist of raw polling sensors at the heart of the system execution engine that gather simple low-impact data elements such as counters and event sensors. Secondary channels provide more elaborate information, such as summaries of the state of individual components and history analysis that stores performance data over lengthy running times. Computer-level metrics provide data on such items as CPU load, network load and memory usage. The message transport service gathers data on messages flowing through it. An extension mechanism based on servlets allows the addition of visualisation plugins that bind to the performance metrics data source. The service that is charged with gathering these metrics is designed so as to have no impact on system performance when not in use.
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Distributed multi-agent systems have become more mature in recent years, with the growing potential to handle large volumes of data and coordinate the operations of many organizations. However, widespread adoption by industry and government has been blocked in part by concerns about scalability and survivability, especially in unpredictable environments of attacks and system failures. In this paper, we present Cougaar, an open-source Java-based agent architecture that provides a survivable base on which to deploy large-scale, robust distributed applications. We define the challenging problem of the UltraLog project; a distributed logistics application comprised of more than 1000 agents distributed over 100 hosts, which guided the design of the Cougaar architecture to ensure scalability, robustness, and security. We conclude with a survey of Cougaar uses as the preferred agent platform for a variety of applications.