Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents


The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents is a body for developing and setting computer software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems.
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 and specifying how agents themselves should communicate and interoperate in a standard way.
Within its lifetime the organization's membership included several academic institutions and a large number of companies including Hewlett Packard, IBM, BT, 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 specifications.
The name FIPA is somewhat of a misnomer as the "physical agents" with which the body is concerned exist solely in software.

Systems using FIPA standards

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