Skip to main content
Log in

FIPA — Towards a Standard for Software Agents

  • Published:
BT Technology Journal

Abstract

Software agent technology will have a significant impact on the shape of the global information society in the next millennium. This branch of systems engineering is rapidly becoming a viable and exploitable technology where BT is well placed as both a potential user and provider of agent-based services and products.

The highly interactive nature of multi-agent systems points to the need for consensus on agent interfaces in order to support interoperability between different agent systems. The completion and adoption of such a standard is a prerequisite to the commercialisation and successful exploitation of agent technology.

This paper describes FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) and its organisation. It provides an overview and guide to the FIPA97 specification. It discusses how FIPA relates to other agent standards activities and concludes with FIPA's plans for 1998.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Busuoic M: 'Distributed cooperative agents for service management in communications networks', 11th IEE Teletraffics Symposium, Cambridge, England (1994).

  2. Maes P: 'Agents that reduce work and information overload', Communications of the ACM, 37, No7 (1994).

  3. Davies N J, Weeks R and Revett M C: 'Information agents for the World Wide Web', in Nwana H and Azarmi N (Eds): 'Software agents and soft computing: towards enhancing machine intelligence,' Springer (1997).

  4. Foner L and Crabtree B: 'Multi-agent matchmaking', in Nwana H and Azarmi A (Eds): 'Software agents and soft computing: towards enhancing machine intelligence', Springer (1997).

  5. Fisk D: 'An application of social filtering to movie recommendation', in Nwana H and Azarmi N (Eds:) 'Software agents and soft computing: towards enhancing machine intelligence', Springer (1997).

  6. O'Brien P D and Wiegand M E: 'Agents of change in business process management', in Nwana H and Azarmi N (Eds): 'Software agents and soft computing: towards enhancing machine intelligence', Springer (1997).

  7. Ndumu D T, Collis J C and Nwana H S: 'Towards desktop personal travel agents', BT Technol J, 16, No3, pp 69—78 (July 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Nwana H S: 'Software agents: an overview', Knowledge Engineering Review, 11, No3 (1996).

  9. Nwana H and Wooldridge M: 'Software agent technologies', in Nwana H and Azarmi N (Eds): 'Software agents and soft computing: towards enhancing machine intelligence', Springer (1997).

  10. FIPA97 Specification Part 1 Agent Management, Issue 1 (see http:// drogo.cselt.it/fipa/) (1997).

  11. FIPA97 Specification Part 2 Agent Communication, Issue 1 (see http:/ /drogo.cselt.it/fipa/) (1997).

  12. FIPA97 Specification Part 3 Agent Software Integration, Issue 1 (see http://drogo.cselt.it/fipa/) (1997).

  13. Finin T et al: 'KQML as an agent communication language', in Bradshaw J (Ed): 'Software Agents', MIT Press (1997).

  14. Neches R: 'Overview of the DARPA knowledge sharing effort', at http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/papers/ksr-overview. html (1994).

  15. Cohen P R and Levesque H J: 'Communicative actions for artificial agents', Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, San Francisco, Cambridge, AAAI Press (1995).

  16. Labrou Y and Finin T: 'A Semantic approach for KQML — a general purpose communication language for software agents', Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information Knowledge Management (1994).

  17. Labrou Y: 'Semantics for an agent communication language', PhD Thesis dissertation, University of Maryland, Baltimore (1996).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Sadek M D, Bretier P and Panaget F: 'Submission for standardisation of components of France Telcoms ARTIMIS technology', FIPA submission, Turin, Italy (1997).

  19. Sadek M D: 'Logical task modelling for man-machine dialogue', Proceedings of AAAI'90, pp 970—975, Boston, MA (1990).

  20. Sadek M D: 'Dialogue acts are rational plans', Proceedings of the ESCA/ETRW Workshop on the structure of multimodal dialogue, pp 1—29, Maratea, Italy (1991).

  21. Sadek M D: 'A study in the logic of intention', Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'92), pp 462—473, Cambridge, MA (1992).

  22. Sadek M D, Bretier P, Cadoret V, Cozannet A, Dupont P, Ferrieux A and Panaget F: 'A co-operative spoken dialogue system based on a rational agent model: a first implementation on the AGS application', Proceedings of the ESCA/ETR Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems: Theories and Applications, Vigso, Denmark (1995).

  23. OMG TC Document: 'Mobile agent systems interoperability facilities specification', orbos/97-10-05 (1997).

  24. Singh M: 'Principles of standardisation for agent communication', submission in response to FIPA 3rd Call for Proposals, Palo Alto (1998).

Download references

Authors

About this article

Cite this article

O'Brien, P.D., Nicol, R.C. FIPA — Towards a Standard for Software Agents. BT Technology Journal 16, 51–59 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009621729979

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009621729979

Keywords

Navigation