Visual specification and monitoring of software agents in decentralized process-centred environments

Distributed, cooperating software agents are useful in many problem domains, such as task automation and work coordination in process-centered environments. We describe a visual language for specifying such software agents, which uses the composition of event-based software components. These specifications may contain interfaces to remotely executing agents, and agents may be run locally or on distributed machines using a decentralized software architecture. As facilities to configure and monitor the state and activities of such distributed, cooperating software agents is essential, we provide primarily visual capabilities to achieve this. Our static and dynamic software agent visualization techniques have been used on several projects where distributed information processing, system interfacing, work coordination and task automation are required. We illustrate our visualization techniques with examples from these domains.