Visualization of Mobile Agents Project Update Ken Deeter CPSC 533C

What are Mobile Agents Mobile agents are programs that “move” in a network. –Ex, to query a network, instead of one host sequentially querying all hosts, send an agent that moves from host to host to do the querying. Agents have interesting and complicated behavior. –Parallel Replication/Recursion –Cooperation

WAVE A programming language that is built for describing the behaviour of agents. –Operates on a virtual network –Notion of network topology and navigation is fundamental in the language’s design –Can concisely specify complex parallel behaviour

My Project Create a general framework to visualize agent behaviour –Should be able to see network topology –Should be able to see some animation describing behaviour/state of agents (including events occurring in parallel) –Should allow for playback and rewind

Target User(s) Developers of agent based algorithms –The intent is to allow people who design programs with agents to visually verify the complex behaviour of their systems. Other uses –Educational tool –Interaction (allow user to affect the algorithm/process by interacting with the visualization, for ex: moving a node)

Specific Design Goals Visualization –Smooth, comprehensible animation of agents, agent state, and parallel agent events –Automatic/controllable graph layout Interaction –Concentrate on specific nodes/agents –Slow motion, rewind (scaling time)

Related Work CPU pipeline visualization –See complex parallel behaviour Automatic graph layout, both dynamic and static Agents –Often used to collect data, but agents themselves are seldom visualized directly. (they are not the main interest in many cases)

Design Specify a logging language that allows applications to record a sequence of events that are to be visualized –For example, “create node x y” “agent N move A B” –Logging must be built into program –Makes visualization generic across many different programs

Implementation Something simple to start –Java2D, Java3D If viz ideas look good, then rewrite using a more scalable library –OpenGL –Other hardware-assisted rendering