Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents

For other uses of "Fipa", see Fipa (disambiguation).

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is a body for developing and setting computer software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems.

FIPA

Founded	1996
Focus	Intelligent agents
Website	www.fipa.org

FIPA was founded as a Swiss not-for-profit organization in 1996 with the ambitious goal of defining a full set of standards for both implementing systems within which agents could execute (agent platforms) and specifying how agents themselves should communicate and interoperate in a standard way.^[1]

Within its lifetime the organization's membership included several academic institutions and a large number of companies including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, BT (formerly British Telecom), Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu and many more. A number of standards were proposed, however, despite several agent platforms adopting the "FIPA standard" for agent communication it never succeeded in gaining the commercial support which was originally envisaged. The Swiss organization was dissolved in 2005 and an IEEE standards committee was set up in its place.

The most widely adopted of the FIPA standards are the Agent Management and Agent Communication Language (FIPA-ACL) specifications.

The name FIPA is somewhat of a misnomer as the "physical agents" with which the body is concerned exist solely in software (and hence have no physical aspect).

Systems using FIPA standards

• Gamma Platform. See FIPA interface
• Fetch.AI
• Jade^[2]
• Jadex Agents (Java)
• Java Intelligent Agent Componentware (JIAC) (Java)
• The SPADE Multiagent and Organizations Platform (Python)
• JACK Intelligent Agents (Java)
• The April Agent Platform (AAP) and Language (April) ^[3] (No longer actively developed)
• Zeus Agent Building Toolkit ^[4] (No longer actively developed)
• The Fipa-OS agent platform ^[5][6] (No longer actively developed)
• AgentService (C#) (last update: 2009)

See also

• Agent Communications Language

External links

• FIPA Official web site

References

1. Poslad, S. (2007). "Specifying Protocols for Multi-agent System Interaction". ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. 2 (4): 15–es. doi:10.1145/1293731.1293735. S2CID 9477595.
2. Bellifeminee, Fabio; Agostino Poggi; Giovanni Rimassa (2001). JADE: a FIPA2000 compliant agent development environment. Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents. pp. 216–217.
3. McCabe, Frank G.; Keith L. Clark (1995). April—agent process interaction language, In: Intelligent Agents. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 324–340.
4. Nwana, Hyacinth; Divine T. Ndumu; Lyndon C. Lee; Jaron C. Collis (1999). ZEUS: a toolkit and approach for building distributed multi-agent systems. AGENTS '99: Proceedings of the third annual conference on Autonomous Agents. pp. 360–361.
5. Poslad, S.; P. Buckle; R. Hadingham (2000). The FIPA-OS agent platform: Open Source for Open Standards. Proceedings of 5th Int. Conf on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM), Manchester, UK. pp. 355–368.,
6. Poslad, S.; Buckle, P.; Hadingham, R.G (2001). "Open Source, Standards and Scaleable Agencies". Infrastructure for Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Scalable Multi-Agent Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 1887. pp. 296–303. doi:10.1007/3-540-47772-1_30. ISBN 978-3-540-42315-7.