Standardizing Agent Interoperability: The FIPA Approach

  • Authors:
  • Stefan Poslad;Patricia Charlton

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • EASSS '01 Selected Tutorial Papers from the 9th ECCAI Advanced Course ACAI 2001 and Agent Link's 3rd European Agent Systems Summer School on Multi-Agent Systems and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

A prolific number of different Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and associated applications have been developed in numerous research institutes and industrial laboratories world-wide. Perhaps the most important barrier to MAS making a successful transition from this research environment towards widespread adoption for consumer products and businesses, is the lack of interoperability between heterogeneous MA Systems. In 1996, the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was formed to provide a forum for developing specifications for agent systems. Since its formation, FIPA has increasingly focussed more on standardizing (multi-agent system) agent interoperability. As a result, it is often said that FIPA really stands for the Foundation for InteroPerable Agents. In this article, we discuss both technical and scientific issues in defining standards for interoperability between agents in different MA systems with a particular focus on the FIPA agent interoperability standards.