FIPA: Intelligent Physical Agents

• FIPA stands for Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents.

Agent Advantages

• Agents provide a 'natural' abstraction level.
• Agents make it easy to specify knowledge.
• Agents offer a useful breakdown of problems.
• Agents have Modularity
• Agents are capable of coping with legacy systems.

Usefulness of Agents

• Intelligent agents make software more adaptable.
• Software becomes more connected through use of agents.
• Software becomes more compatible through use of agents.
• Software becomes capable of handling complex tasks intelligently.

Limitations of Agents

• Wizards, scripting languages, programming languages, neural networks, pure rule-based systems and objects can be seen as replacements for agents.

Human Agents

• Goal-driven behavior is a key characteristic.
• Adaptability is a key characteristic.
• Interactive nature is a key characteristic.
• Intelligence is a key characteristic.

Agent Standards and Initiatives

• Agent standards include FIPA, JAS, and OMG.
• Agent initiatives include Agenticities, TILAB, and MOTOROLA.
• JADE + J2EE leads to BlueJADE as a robust agent platform.
• There is only one agent management system.
• The Agent Platform provides a message transport system.
• Message transport is the default communication method.
• Agent Management System (AMS) and Directory Facilitator (DF) share actions like register, deregister, search, and modify.
• FIPA aims to define standards for systems where agents execute, communicate, and interact.

FIPA Agent Execution Model

• An agent controls its thread of execution.
• An agent decides when to read received messages.
• The transport mechanism uses a private queue.
• The transport mechanism does not call the agent code.
• Agents need concurrency for simultaneous conversations and tasks.

Agent Naming

• Agents are identified through an Agent Identifier (AID).
• The AID is an extensible collection of parameter value pairs.
• An agent's name is immutable.
• AID parameters can be changed.
• An agent can support multiple communication methods through AID.
• Transport address values can be put in the addresses parameter of an AID.

JADE States

• JADE states include ap_initiated, ap_active, ap_suspended, ap_waiting, ap_deleted, and ap_transit.
• ap_copy and ap_gone are generated by the JADE platform.

Agent Communications

• Refers to messaging.
• Message transport protocols include IIOP and HTTP.
• String encoding, bit-efficient encoding, and XML are three types of encoding.
• Each message protocol supports all three encoding types.

Message Structure

• A message has an envelope for transporting information.
• A message body exists for the ACL message of agent communication.

Agent Communication Language (ACL)

• ACL used for structured messages.
• ACL options include addressing and performatives.
• Parameters in ACL: in reply to, reply by, content, reply with.

Content Language (CL)

• CL defines syntax for content expressions.
• CL includes operators like AND and OR.

Semantic Language (SL)

• SL describes actions and propositions.
• SL describes identifying expressions.