Abstract
This work analyses the problematic of debugging a multi-agent system. It starts from the fact that MAS are a particular type of distributed systems in which the active entities are autonomous in the sense that behavior and knowledge of the whole system is distributed among agents. It situates the problem by firstly studying the classical approaches for conventional code debugging and also the techniques used in distributed systems in general. From this initial perspective, it tries to situate agent and multi-agent systems debugging. It finally proposes the use of conventional data mining tasks like clustering to, by summarising, help in debugging huge MAS.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abdelwahed, S., Wonham, W.M.: Blocking detection in discrete event systems. In: Proceeding of the American Control Conference, Denver, Colorado, pp. 1673–1678 (2003)
Alberti, M., Gavanelli, M., Lamma, E., Mello, P., Torroni, P.: Specification and verification of agent interaction using social integrity constraints. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 85(2) (2004)
Andrews, G.R.: Concurrent Programming. Principles and Practice. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1991)
Botía, J.A., Hernansáez, J.M., Gómez-Skarmeta, A.F.: Towards an approach for debugging mas through the analysis of acl messages. Computer Systems Science and Engineering 20 (2005)
Clarke, E.M., Grumber, O., Peled, D.: Model Checking. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Cohen, P.R., Levesque, H.J.: Communicative actions for artificial agents. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-95), San Francisco, CA, June 1995, pp. 65–72 (1995)
Engler, D., Ashcraft, K.: Racerx: Effective, static detection of race conditions and deadlocks. In: Proceedings of the SOSP (2003)
Fayyad, U., Piatetsky-Shapiro, G., Smyth, P.: Data Mining and Its Applications: A General Overview. In: Han, J., Simoudis, E., Fayyad, U. (eds.) The Second International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, August 1996, AAAI Press, Menlo Park (1996)
FIPA: FIPA Contract Net Interaction Protocol Specification. SC00030 (2002)
Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents: FIPA Communicative Act Library Specification. SC00037 (2002)
Guha, S., Rastogi, R., Shim, K.: ROCK: A robust clustering algorithm for categorical attributes. Information Systems 25(5), 345–366 (2000), http://www.citeseer.nj.nec.com/guha00rock.html
Lam, D.N., Barber, K.S.: Comprehending agent software. In: AAMAS ’05: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, pp. 586–593. ACM Press, New York (2005)
MacQueen, J.B.: Some methods for classification and analysis of multivariate observations. In: 5-th Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, Berkeley, University of California Press, Berkeley (1967)
Mitchell, T.M.: Machine Learning. McGraw-Hill, New York (1997)
Muller, J.P.: The Design of Intelligent Agents. A Layered Approach. In: Saad, Y., Yang, T., Ferreira, A., Rolim, J.D.P. (eds.) IRREGULAR 1996. LNCS, vol. 1117, Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Musuvathi, M., Park, D.Y.W., Chou, A., Engler, D.R., Dill, D.L.: Cmc: A pragmatic approach to model checking real code. In: Proceedings of the OSDI (2002)
Poutakidis, D., Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: Debugging multi-agent systems using design artifacts: The case of interaction protocols. In: AAMAS’02, Bologna, Italy, July (2002)
Poutakidis, D., Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: An exploration of bugs and debugging in multi-agent systems. In: Zhong, N., Raś, Z.W., Tsumoto, S., Suzuki, E. (eds.) ISMIS 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2871, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Reisig, W.: Petri Nets, An Introduction. Springer, Berlin (1985)
Smith, R.R.: The contract net protocol: High-level communication and control in a distributed problem solver. In: Bond, A.H., Gasser, L. (eds.) Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence, pp. 357–366. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Los Altos (1988)
Wegrzyn, A., Karatkevich, A., Bieganowski, J.: Detection of deadlocks and traps in petri nets by means of thelen’s prime implicant method. International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science 14(1), 113–121 (2004)
Whittaker, J.A.: What is software testing? and why it is so hard? IEEE Software, 70–79 (January 2000)
Wills, G., Keim, D.: Data visualization for domain exploration. In: Handbook of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, pp. 226–232. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002)
Zhou, P., Qin, F., Liu, W., Zhou, Y., Torrellas, J.: iwatcher: Simple, general architectural support for software debugging. IEEE Micro, 50–56 (November 2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Botía, J.A., Hernansáez, J.M., Gómez-Skarmeta, A.F. (2007). On the Application of Clustering Techniques to Support Debugging Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems. In: Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., Seghrouchni, A.E.F. (eds) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. ProMAS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4411. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71956-4_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71956-4_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71955-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71956-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)
