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.
The ability to effectively debug agent-oriented applications is vital if agent technologies are to become adopted as a viable alternative for complex systems development. Recent advances in the area have focussed on the provision of support for debugging agent interaction where tools have been provided that allow developers to analyse and debug the messages that are passed between agents. One potential approach for constructing agent-oriented applications is through the use of agent programming languages. Such languages employ mental notions such as beliefs, goals, commitments, and intentions to facilitate the construction of agent programs that specify the high-level behaviour of the agent. This paper describes how debugging has been supported for one such language, namely the Agent Factory Agent Programming Language (AFAPL).