1 Summary
2 Introduction
Internet usage is growing explosively, mobile data services are reaching users worldwide and businesses are moving to the web to connect with the customers, suppliers and partners. Despites its huge success, today's Internet lacks several features that enable easy, user friendly use of services everywhere and any time when needed by users. Agent technology has the potential to play a key role in improving the use of the Internet by automating processes, enriching system-system communication and bringing more intelligence service provision. To realise this potential, agents require standards, they need to communicate to discover their peers, to negotiate and to co-operate in an open environment where everybody can add their contribution when and how it is deemed appropriate.
The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was formed in 1996 as a non-profit organisation with the remit of producing software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems across multiple vendors' platforms. This is expressed more formally in FIPA's official mission statement:
The promotion of technologies and interoperability specifications that facilitate the end-to-end interworking of intelligent agent systems in modern commercial and industrial settings.
The emphasis here is therefore on the practical commercial and industrial uses of agent systems. The aim is to bring together the latest advances in agent research with industry best practice in software, networks and business systems.
FIPA has produced several sets of specifications to create an environment where agents can operate and interoperate with each other. The last years have seen intense activity within FIPA and great changes in the technological landscape which forms the backdrop for its activities. This has resulted in both technical advances and changes to FIPA’s structure and specification process. One of the main procedural changes is a multi-step document process reflecting the different levels of maturity of the specifications through successive grades of maturity: Preliminary, Experimental, Standard through Deprecated and Obsolete. Technical work has also made significant progress. Development of a global Framework to link together the totality of FIPA specifications into a single Abstract Architecture. Modularisation of all specifications to create a “plug and play” architecture supporting interchangeable component specifications for areas such as content languages, performatives, protocols, message transport and language syntax complemented by profiles to link together sets of components.
Web technologies, such as XML based languages and protocols, WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP are also progressing in a fast phase. Specifying a HTTP message transport, XML encodings for FIPA ACL messages, and an RDF content language has already done integration of Web technologies with the FIPA standards. Moreover, activities to integrate WSDL and UDDI with the FIPA standards are underway.
This paper discusses about the following issues: What is FIPA’s technology, what is the status of it, what are the benetfits of using FIPA’s technology, and applications of FIPA’s technology.
3 What is FIPA’s technology
FIPA’s technology is dealing with software agent technology. Software agent technology is an emerging paradigm to design and implement distributed applications. Software agents have a long history. The term agent in the context of software was first introduced in the mid-1950's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Agent research studies different kinds of agents and agent systems starting from single, intelligent agents—e.g., BDI (Belief, Desire, and Intention) agent—to multi-agent systems (MAS) consisting of numerous simple, co-operating agents. An intelligent agent is capable of autonomous actions in order to achieve its goals, which are defined in their design objectives. This requires at least three following things: 1) Reactivity: intelligent agents are able to perceive their environment, and respond in a timely fashion to changes that occur in their environment in order to achieve their goals; 2) Pro-activeness: intelligent agents are able to exhibit goal-directed behaviour by taking an initiative in order to achieve their goals; 3) Social ability: intelligent agents are capable to of interacting with other agents in order to achieve their goals. There are also other attributes that intelligent agents are mentioned to have. Temporal continuity means persistence of identity and state over long periods. Adaptability means capability to learn and improve with experience. Mobility means capability to migrate in a self-directed way from one host platform to another. To summarize, we can say that an intelligent agent is a system situated within and a part of an environment that senses that environment and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda and to affect what it senses in the future.
Agent-to-agent communication is one of the key issues in the multi-agent systems. There are two approaches: either to standardize the communication between agents or to rely on propriety solutions. FIPA’ s members strongly believe that agent-to-agent communication must rely on standardized solutions in order to provide an overall, coherent platform for many different kinds of application domains. FIPA’s technology solves the problems of agent interaction in a distributed service environment enabling various software agents to communicate with each other.
software agents to play a significant role in the next generation Web.[HeL2]
3.1 Current Generation of FIPA Specifications
FIPA specifications are divided into five categories: Applications, Abstract Architecture, Agent Communication, Agent Management and Agent Message Transport. Each area of specifications has one or more specification documents assigned to it and involved one or more technical committees or working groups.
3.1.1 Abstract Architecture
The purpose of the FIPA Abstract Architecture (see [FIPA00001]) is to foster interoperability and reusability, this leads to the identification of architectural abstractions linked by their relationships. It makes a distinction between those elements which can easily be defined in an abstract manner, such as agent message transport, FIPA ACL, directory services and content languages, and between those elements that cannot, such as agent management and agent mobility. These are considered difficult to represent abstractly since they occur too close to the concrete realisation (implementation) of an agent system and very little commonality can be derived from analysing them. Yet, these issues will have to be addresses by developers and the abstract architecture will provide a number of instantiation guidelines in the future for specific groupings of implementation technologies.
The first concrete realization of the abstract architecture is the Java Agent Service project, which is being developed as part of the Java Community Process.
3.1.2 Agent Message Transport
The FIPA Agent Message Transport Specifications deal with the delivery and representation of messages across different network transport protocols, including wireline and wireless environments.
At the message transport level, a message consists of a message envelope and a message body. The envelope contains specific transport requirements and information that is used by the Message Transport Service (MTS) on each agent platform to route and handle messages. The message body is the payload and is usually expressed in FIPA ACL but is opaque to the MTS since it may be compressed or encoded.
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Figure 1: Agent Message Transport Reference Model |
The agent message transport reference model provides facilities for (see Figure 1):
· General support for an MTS within an agent platform (see [FIPA00067]).
· Guidelines for using specific Message Transport Protocols (MTPs), such as IIOP (see [FIPA00075]), HTTP (see [FIPA00084]) and WAP (see [FIPA00076]).
· Message envelope representations those are suitable for each MTP, such as an XML encoding for HTTP (see [FIPA00085]) and a bit-efficient encoding for WAP (see [FIPA00088]).
· FIPA ACL representations, such as a string encoding (see [FIPA00070]), an XML encoding (see [FIPA00071]) and a bit-efficient encoding (see [FIPA00069]).
The MTS on each agent platform can support any number of message transport protocols and will normally translate between a FIPA-supported MTP that is used for interoperable communication between heterogeneous agent platforms (such as XML over HTTP) and an MTP that is used internally to the agent platform (such as Java objects over the Java Messaging Service).
Consequently, the components of the MTS are designed to be modular and extensible to handle different message transport protocols, message envelope and FIPA ACL representations in the future.
3.1.3 Agent Management
The FIPA Agent Management Specification (see [FIPA00023]) provides the framework within which FIPA agents exist and operate. It establishes the logical reference model for the creation, registration, location, communication, migration and retirement of agents.
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Figure 2: Agent Management Reference Model |
The reference model (see Figure 2) describes the primitives and ontologies necessary to support the following services in an agent platform:
· 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 as described previously in section 3.2.2.
In conjunction with the FIPA Agent Message Transport Specifications, the FIPA Agent Management Specification also provides support for intermittently connected devices, such as laptop computers and personal digital assistants through message buffering, redirection and proxying.
3.1.4 Agent Communication
Developers of multi-agent systems require specialised communication techniques in order to structure the interactions in their agent systems. Ad hoc techniques are usually not sufficiently well designed or documented to be consistently extensible and implementable by others, or generally applicable to a wide set of agent problems. The FIPA specifications for agent communication address these issues. The core of these specifications was largely completed in FIPA 97, but this specification set has required continual maintenance and development since then. The specifications of the communication language, along with libraries of predefined communicative act types, interaction protocols and content languages were developed. Add here an example of agent communication[HeL3]
3.1.5 Agent Applications
FIPA has developed specifications of four agent-based applications that contain service and ontology descriptions and case scenarios:
· Personal Travel Assistance: individualised, automated access to travel services (see [FIPA00080]).
· Audio-Visual Entertainment and Broadcasting: negotiating, filtering, and retrieving audio-visual information, in particular for digital broadcasting networks (see [FIPA00081]).
· Network Management and Provisioning: automated provisioning ofdynamic Virtual Private Network services where a user wants to set up a multi-media connection with several other users (see [FIPA00082]).
· Personal Assistant: management of a user's personal meeting schedule, in particular in determining time and place arrangements for meetings with several participants (see [FIPA00083]).
Additionally, the Agent Software Integration specification (see [FIPA00079]) contains guidelines for integrating legacy software, that is, software that does not communicate using FIPA ACL.
4 Status of FIPA’s Technology
FIPA has several specifications in the experimental status. As there are already several implementations, it is expected that by the end of year 2002 many of these experimental specifications will be promoted to the standard status. The following specifications will promoted: tbd. If needed?[HeL4]
FIPA has solutions for …
Following issues still need to be solved …
5 Benefits of Using FIPA’s Technology
TBD.
6 Service Development Based FIPA’s Technology
Sixteen FIPA platforms have been implemented by diverse companies, four of these are freely accessible under open source (see Table 1). These FIPA platforms have been distributed and tested in large-scale projects, which collectively have been downloaded several thousands of times.
|
Organisation |
Platform Name |
|
Comtec (Japan) |
Comtec Agent Platform |
|
CSELT (Italy) |
Java Agent Development Framework (JADE)[2] |
|
Fujitsu Laboratories of America (USA) |
April Agent Platform[3] (AAP) |
|
Emorphia Ltd (UK) |
FIPA-OS[4] |
Table 1: Available Open Source FIPA Agent Platform Implementations
In addition to a choice of FIPA platforms which are aimed at agent researchers with software development experience, there is also a need for agent development environments that cater for non-specialists. ZEUS is one such platform and it is based around a GUI that facilitates the rapid development of collaborative agent applications (see Table 2).
|
Company |
Platform Name |
|
BT Laboratories (UK) |
ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit[5] |
|
Table 2. Available Open Source FIPA Agent Development Environments |
The next generation of platforms is already under development: two ongoing European projects include work on enabling the FIPA platforms for wireless devices (CRUMPET [CRUMPET] and LEAP [LEAP]), and a Java Community Process (JAS) addressing Java Interfaces for agent services has recently started [JAS-2000]. These initiatives aim to deliver new implementations by the end of 2001.
We need text to describe how to develop services on top of these existing platforms:
- ease of it
- benefits etc.
7 Applications of FIPA’s Technology
Applications:
- manufacturing
- planning and scheduling
- groupwork
- tourism
- ecommerce
o matchmaking
o auctions
o delivery of goods
- Medical
- Web services in general
- Wireless data communications
- Personal assistance
o Calendars
- Ubiqutious computing?
8 Relationship Between FIPA’s Technology and Other Related Technology
Semantic Web
Web Services
DAML
Ontoweb
P2P
“Web Programming” e.g. Microsoft.NET
9 Summary
Tbd.