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VizScript: on the creation of efficient visualizations for understanding complex multi-agent systems

Published: 13 January 2008 Publication History

Abstract

One of the most difficult tasks in software development is understanding the behavior of the final product. Making sure that a system behaves as users expect is a challenging endeavor. Understanding the behavior of a multi-agent system is even more challenging given the additional complexities of multi-agent problems. In this paper, we address the problem of users creating visualizations to debug and understand complex multi-agent systems. We introduce VizScript, a generic framework that expedites the process of creating such visualizations. VizScript combines a generic application instrumentation, a knowledge-base, and simple scene definitions primitives with a reasoning system, to produce an easy to use visualization platform. Using VizScript, we were able to recreate the visualizations for a complex multiagent system with an order-of-magnitude less effort than was required in a Java implementation

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  • (2022)Spatio-temporal Analysis of Multi-agent Scheduling Behaviors on Fixed-track Networks2022 IEEE 15th Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis)10.1109/PacificVis53943.2022.00011(21-30)Online publication date: Apr-2022
  • (2020)A Visual Analytics Approach to Debugging Cooperative, Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems’ Worldviews2020 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST)10.1109/VAST50239.2020.00008(24-35)Online publication date: Oct-2020
  • (2011)Automated adaptation of strategic guidance in multiagent coordinationProceedings of the 14th international conference on Agents in Principle, Agents in Practice10.1007/978-3-642-25044-6_20(247-262)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2011
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IUI '08: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
    January 2008
    458 pages
    ISBN:9781595939876
    DOI:10.1145/1378773
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 13 January 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. multi-agent systems
    2. rule-based systems
    3. scripting languages
    4. software visualization

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    View all
    • (2022)Spatio-temporal Analysis of Multi-agent Scheduling Behaviors on Fixed-track Networks2022 IEEE 15th Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis)10.1109/PacificVis53943.2022.00011(21-30)Online publication date: Apr-2022
    • (2020)A Visual Analytics Approach to Debugging Cooperative, Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems’ Worldviews2020 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST)10.1109/VAST50239.2020.00008(24-35)Online publication date: Oct-2020
    • (2011)Automated adaptation of strategic guidance in multiagent coordinationProceedings of the 14th international conference on Agents in Principle, Agents in Practice10.1007/978-3-642-25044-6_20(247-262)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2011
    • (2009)Web-based visualization of student cooperation during distributed laboratory experimentationProceedings of the 6th international conference on Cooperative design, visualization, and engineering10.5555/1812983.1813031(317-324)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2009

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