FIPA-OS Summary

FIPA

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is a nonprofit standards organisation established in 1996 and registered in Geneva, Switzerland. Its purpose is to promote the development of specifications of generic agent technologies that maximise interoperability within and across agent based applications. Part of its function is to produce a specification for an Agent enabling software framework. Contributors are free to produce their own implementations of this software framework as long as its construction and operation complies with the published FIPA specification. In this way the individual software frameworks are interoperable.

FIPA Reference Model

The FIPA reference model shown below illustrates the core components of the FIPA-OS distribution. The agent reference model provides the normative framework within which FIPA Agents exist and operate. Combined with the Agent Life cycle, it establishes the logical and temporal contexts for the creation, operation and retirement of Agents.

The Directory Facilitator (DF) and Agent Management System (AMS) are specific types of agents, which support agent management. The DF provides "yellow pages" services to other agents. The AMS provides agent lifecycle management for the platform. The ACC supports interoperability both within and across different platforms. The Internal Message Transport Protocols (MTPs) provides a message routing service for agents on a particular platform which must be reliable, orderly and adhere to the requirements specified by FIPA Specification XC00067- Agent Message Transport Service Specification.

The ACC, AMS, Internal MTPs and DF form what will be termed the Agent Platform (AP). These are mandatory, normative components of the model. For further information on the FIPA Agent Platform see FIPA XC00023 - Agent Management Specification. In addition to the mandatory components of the FIPA Reference Model, the FIPA-OS distribution includes an Agent Shell, an empty template for an agent. Mutliple agents can be produced from this template, which can then communicate with each other using the FIPA-OS facilities.