An integrated infrastructure for monitoring and evaluating agent-based systems

Driven by the urging need to thoroughly identify and accentuate the merits of agent technology, we present in this paper MEANDER, an integrated framework for evaluating the performance of agent-based systems. The proposed framework is based on the Agent Performance Evaluation (APE) methodology, which provides guidelines and representation tools for performance metrics, measurement collection and aggregation of measurements. MEANDER comprises a series of integrated software components that implement and automate various parts of the methodology and assist evaluators in their tasks. The main objective of MEANDER is to integrate performance evaluation processes into the entire development lifecycle, while clearly separating any evaluation-specific code from the application code at hand. In this paper, we describe in detail the architecture and functionality of the MEANDER components and test its applicability to an existing multi-agent system.