Visual Management Agent (VMA)

VMA is an agent that offers a graphical interface to platform administration and platform monitoring. The agent offers many services that show the state of the Agent Platform and it also offers various tools that are used to perform administrative interaction with the AMS agent, the DF agent and are also be used to debug and test applications. The state of the Agent Platform also shows the details of the agents that reside inside the platform.

The VMA itself offers some internal agents for platform management and monitoring that can be used to perform different tasks such as:

• Examination of the message exchanges among different agents.
• Create or compose ACL messages and send them to other agents.
• Display the list of all the ACL messages sent or received by the agent.
• Read and save ACL messages from/to file.
• Sniff a particular agent (optional).
• Create ontologies graphically.

VMA also provides graphical interface for the administration of the Directory Facilitator and Agent Management System.

Because VMA is an agent therefore it would communicate with AMS agent and DF agent through passing ACL messages. For the creation of ACL messages VMA package will use ACL package and will compose ACL message. After that the ACL message will be send to the Message Transport Service that will forward that message to the respective agent.