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)

11 Discovering an agent agent-directory-service agent-directory-entry

12 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

14 Message exchange - transport transport transport-message transport-description (transport-type, transport- specific-address, transport-specific-property)

15 Conclusion FIPA’s 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.