Open standards for interoperating agent‐based systems

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) standardisation effort in the area of specifying standards for heterogeneous, interoperating agent‐based systems. JONATHAN DALE and EBRAHIM MAMDANI describe the types of software agents which are of interest to FIPA, the methods by which FIPA members collaborate and produce specifications and also descriptions of the specifications that FIPA has produced. They also list the available implementations of FIPA specifications and applications that use these implementations, as well as the current and future work of FIPA. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Market design test environments

“…[2] In ACE market simulations, people, automated machine decision making, and other aspects of the physical world are represented by software agents. Two important features of ACE models are the agents' autonomous behavior in pursuit of some goal and their communal interaction, particularly their ability to communicate with each other.…”

“…Standards for operational environments, such as those being developed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents FIPA [2], as well as advances in electronic commerce approaches such as service-oriented architectures, are facilitating the interaction of agents across software platforms. This is enabling the modeling of large complex systems of systems.…”

Modelling the Structure and Behaviour of Petri Net Agents

“…Neither the content of the messages nor the way that they are used is limited, only their syntactical structure is fixed. Some advantages of the use of a standardised communication mechanism can be found in [9]. The presented agent model corresponds to the fundamental assumptions about agents: Because agents should show autonomy, they must be able to exercise an independent control over their actions.…”

“…If an agent receives a messages carrying such a reference to an existing conversation, transition in is enabled instead of transition reactive. The net inscriptions that guarantee this enabling are not 9 Protocol adaptation is done in a way similar to the "'reconfigurable nets"' formalism [1], i.e. restricted self-modifying nets [35].…”

FIPA Compliant Agent-based Decentralised Expert System

“…[1,6,16]). Yet none of these approaches make use of existing standards -such as FIPA [5] -allowing for agent-based systems interoperability. In the paper a FIPAcompliant architecture dedicated for distributed expert system development (FIPA-DES) is proposed.…”