Foundation For Intelligent Physical Agents FIPA Abstract Architecture Specification

1
Foundation For Intelligent Physical Agents FIPA
Abstract Architecture Specification

• Presented by
• Michal Zaremba
• DERI

2
Content

• Introduction (background scope)
• Architecture overview (selected architectural
  elements)
• Starting agent
• Agent discovery services
• Service directory services
• Agent message message exchange
• Conclusions

3
Background

• Goal to promote inter-operable agent
  application and agent systems
• Agents pass semantically meaningful messages one
  to another in order to accomplish the tasks
  required by the application
• Use existing software environments.

4
Scope

• A model of services and discovery of services
  available to agents and other services,
• Message transport interoperability,
• Supporting various forms of Agent Communication
  Language representations,
• Supporting various forms of content language,
• Supporting multiple directory services
  representations.

5
Abstract ? Concrete

• The concrete specification, based on abstract
  spec, should describe how to construct an agent
  system, including the agents and the services
  that they rely upon
• realization - the definition of an abstract
  architectural element in terms of the concrete
  architecture.

6
Architectural Elements

• FIPA Abstract Architecture describes informally
  semantics for each element followed by the
  relationships between this element and other
  elements.

7
Agents and Services

• agents
• agent-communication-language
• service
• agent-directory-service
• message-transport-service
• service-directory-service

8
Starting an Agent

• service-root
• service-directory-service
• service-locator
• message-transport-service
• agent-directory-service
• service-directory-service

9
Agent Discovery Services

• agent-directory-service
• agent-directory-entry
• agent-name
• agent-locator (transport-description,
  transport-type, transport-specific-address,
  transport-specific-properties)

10
Registering an Agent

• transport
• message-transport-service
• agent-directory-entry (agent-name agent-locator
  optional attributes)

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Discovering an agent

• agent-directory-service
• agent-directory-entry

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Service Directory Services

• Service-directory-service
• service-name
• service-type
• service-locator (signature-type,
  service-signature, service-address)
• service-attributes

13
Agent Message

• Message Structure
• Message Transport

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Message exchange - transport

• transport
• transport-message
• transport-description (transport-type,
  transport-specific-address, transport-specific-pro
  perty)

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Conclusion

• FIPAs creates agent standards to promote
  inter-operable agent applications and agent
  systems
• FIPA Abstract Architecture Specification presents
  a very abstract architecture to accommodate a
  wide range of commonly used mechanisms such as
  various message transports, directory services
  and popular commercial platforms.