Visualization of Mobile Agents

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Visualization of Mobile Agents

• Project Update
• Ken Deeter
• CPSC 533C

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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

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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 languages design
• Can concisely specify complex parallel behaviour

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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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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

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Implementation

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