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Visualising the behaviour of systems with distributed data, control and process is a notoriously difficult task. Each component in the distributed system has only a local view of the whole set-up, and the onus is on the user to integrate, into a coherent whole, the large amounts of limited information they provide. In this paper, we describe an architecture and an implemented system for visualising and controlling distributed multi-agent applications. The system comprises a suite of tools, with each tool providing a different perspective of the application being visualised. Each tool interrogates the components of the distributed application, collates the returned information and presents this information to users in an appropriate manner. This in essence shifts the burden of inference from the user to the visualiser. Our visualiser has been evaluated on four distributed multi-agent systems: a travel management application, a telecommunications network management application, a business process management demonstrator, and an electronic commerce application. Lastly, we briefly show how the suite of tools can be used together for debugging multi-agent applications -an approach we refer to as debugging via corroboration.

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The innate difficulty of constructing multi-agent systems has motivated agent developers to move away from developing point solutions to point problems in favour of developing methodologies and toolkits for building distributed multi-agent systems. This philosophy led to the development of the ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit, which facilitates the rapid development of collaborative agent applications through the provision of a library of agent-level components and an environment to support the agent building process. The ZEUS toolkit is a synthesis of established agent technologies with some novel solutions to provide an integrated collaborative agent building environment.