Agent Viz: A visualization system for mobile agents

Abstract

Although inexpensive, high performance computer graphics hardware has become commonly available, its application in the mobile agent and networking fields has thus far been limited. In this paper, we present AgentViz, a visualization tool which utilizes this technology to display and animate the parallel behavior of mobile agents over a network topology. This system provides an effective way for developers of mobile agent-based systems to understand, illustrate, and verify the operation of their systems without the need to manually process large log files. AgentViz makes use of information visualization techniques to allow users to efficiently explore large network topologies with a large number of agents. The system is built with a generic architecture to allow it to be used in a variety of situations. We also present two case studies detailing applications of the tool to visualize mobile agent-based simulations. © Springer-Verlag 2004.