1. Visualization of the Carrot 2 System
Thomas Laufert
Center for Architectures for Data-Driven Information Processing
University of Maryland Baltimore County

2. Outline Introduction Background Related Work Carrot 2 Visualization
Ontology
Implementation
Discussion
Future Work
Conclusion

3. Introduction What is Carrot 2? Why is Visualization desired?
Distributed Multi-Agent Information Retrieval System
Why is Visualization desired?
Autonomy can lead to unpredictability and confusion
Is it necessary?

4. Introduction Agent Visualization Problem What’s Next?
Large amount of information
Limited real estate
Performance
What’s Next?

5. Background Debugging Visualization of communication patterns
Debugging multi-agent-systems can be difficult.
Visualization of communication patterns
Is there method in its madness?
Demonstrating
To show to large audiences the performance of the Carrot 2 system.

6. Related Work Ndumu/ZEUS Szekely – Punch Card System Multiple domains
Separation of tasks to different tool sets
Szekely – Punch Card System
Punch card where each “hole” represents an agent, different colors represent status of the agent.
Scalability – tens of thousands

7. Related Work JADE RETSINA MOCHA
Visualization incorporated into JADE environment
Multiple tools; Control, debugging, and message visualization
RETSINA MOCHA
Mobile agent-communication framework
Visualization incorporated into framework

8. Carrot 2 Visualization Scaleable to tens of thousands of agents
Separation of tasks
Queries
Meta-data
Event Ontology

9. Event Ontology
Event Hierarchy

10. Event Ontology Agent Registration Query Routing Query Receipt
Agents must register with the ANS
Query Routing
When agents receive a query they route the query to determine what action to perform on it
Query Receipt
When an agent receives a query they throw an event.

11. Event Ontology Query Forwarding Query Processing Query Response
The agent can forward the query to a more appropriate agent to handle the query
Query Processing
Process the query against its collection
Query Response
Query Processing has been performed and agent responds to the sender
Receiving the Results of a Query
An agent receives the results of a recently processed query

12. Event Ontology Other Events
Meta-data
Collection distribution
How is this information useful in debugging?

13. Implementation Java Application using Swing Logger Agent
Logs the events given to it from the agents in the system to a file
Visualizer gets all information from the Logger agent
Will not affect performance significantly

14. Implementation Visualizer can work in an offline or online state
JLists representing event history lists for each node in the system.
Events differentiated by color of text in the JList

15. Implementation Agent Registration Query Routing Query Receipt
Query Forwarding
Query Processing
Query Response
Receiving Results

16. Discussion How to determine what information to visualize
Limited Real Estate
Online and Offline visualization modes

17. Future Work Augmented Event Ontology
Incorporate Logger agent as an component in the visualizer tool
Port Visualization tool to work in other systems

18. Conclusion
With large scale multi-agent-systems visualization is important to aid in:
Debugging
Understanding communication
Visualization makes it easy

19. References JADE: http://sharon.cselt.it/projects/jade
RETSINA MOCHA:
ZEUS: