Fipa Introduction

We give an overview of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA [1]). This talk is based on

Jonathan Dale and Ebrahim Mamdani. Open Standards for Interoperating Agent-Based Systems. [2] Software Focus, 1(2), 2001.

FIPA is the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, with website at www.fipa.org [3]
Concerned with agency as it relates to

Does not dictate how agent is implemented, but agent must obey the BDI semantics FIPA describes. This becomes an issue because it is hard to test for rationality.

Mission Statement: The promotion of technologies and interoperability specifications that facilitate the end-to-end inter-working of intelligent agent systems in modern commercial and industrial settings.
Goal: through a combination of speech acts, predicate logic and public ontologies, FIPA can offer standard ways of interpreting communication between agents in a way that respects the intended meaning of the communication. This is much more ambitious than, for example, XML, which only aims to standardize the syntactic structure of documents.

Europe	Americas	Asia
Europe AEGIS British Telecommunications Broadcom France Telecom Hi-Flier Lost Wax Ltd. Minutor Oy Agentscape Robert Bosch GmbH SGI Soluciones Globales Internet SiemensAG Sixth Element Group Ltd. Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Sonera Telecom Italia Lab Telia AB Teltec Ireland Tryllian BV Whitestein Technology	Allen Bradley LLC (Rockwell Automation) Hewlett Packard Company IBM Corporation Intel Corporation James Odell Associates MITRE Corporation Motorola NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center Sandia National Lab Sun Microsystems, Inc. Telcordia Technologies The Boeing Company WebV2, Inc.	Communication technologies Electronic and Telecommunications Research Institute Fujitsu Limited Hitachi KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc. Mitsubishi Electric Corp. NEC Corporation Nihon Unisys Ltd. Nippon Hoso Kyokai Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation OKI Electronic Industry, Co Ltd Pioneer Electronic Corporation Toshiba Corp. Victor Company of Japan, Co. Ltd

The agent platform encompasses the agent and MTS.
Agent Message Transport (AMT) defines a message as an envelope plus a body. They handle
- Guidelines for various transport protocols (e.g., IIOP, HTTP, WAP)
- Message envelope representation (e.g., XML for HTTP, bit-efficient for WAP).
- FIPA ACL representations (e.g., string encoding, XML encoding, bit-efficient encoding).

Handles the creation, registration, location, communication, migration and retirement of agents. It provides the following services:
- White pages, such as agent location, naming and control access services, which are provided by the Agent Management System (AMS). Agent names are represented by a flexible and extensible structure called an agent identifier, which can support social names, transport addresses, name resolution services, amongst other things.
- Yellow pages, such as service location and registration services, which are provided by the Directory Facilitator (DF).
- Agent message transport services.

Message
Expressed in an
Agent Communication Language

Sender: Agent-name
Receiver: Agent-name

Message: content

Expressed in a content language
May reference an ontology

Based on communicative acts (performatives) which are illocutionary verbs (i.e., they describe the speaker's intention).
ACL = ca + msg. ACL provides mechanism for context (e.g., sender, receiver, ontology, protocol).
FIPA ACL based on ARCOL and KQML.
Content (msg part) is in a content language such as the FIPA semantic language, constraint choice language, KIF, RDF.
FIPA Interaction Protocols (IPs) describe conversations for the purpose of achieving some interaction or effect (e.g., auction, contract-net, negotiation).

1 Introduction