A Monitoring Toolset for Paose

Paose

(Petri net-based Agent-Oriented Software Engineering) combines the paradigm of AOSE (Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, see [10]) with the expressive power of Petri nets - reference nets [12] to be more precise. While AOSE is a powerful approach when it comes to designing and developing distributed (agent) applications, it does not address the problems specific to debugging, monitoring, and testing of these applications, i.e. no global state of the system and very dynamic operating conditions. To tackle these problems, two tools have been developed in the context of

Paose

, which are presented in this work.

Firstly, this paper will give a short overview over the interrelated set of tools, which exists already and supports Petri net-based AOSE. The tools are centered around the Petri net-based multi-agent system development and runtime environment

Renew

/

Mulan

/

Capa

.

Secondly,

Mulan

-Viewer and

Mulan

-Sniffer will be presented in more detail – two tools to address the issues encountered during debugging, monitoring, and testing agent applications. Both tools are first class members of the aforementioned family. The first tool,

Mulan

-Viewer, deals with the introspection of agents and agent behaviors, while it also offers rudimentary features for controlling the agent-system. The

Mulan

-Sniffer as the second tool places emphasis on tracing, visualizing, and analyzing communication between all parts of the multi-agent application and offers interfaces for more advanced methods of analysis, such as process mining. Both

Mulan

-Viewer and

Mulan

-Sniffer are realized as

Renew

plugins that can also be extended by other plugins.