FIPA: BT Position Statement

Introduction

BT is a global company whose business is moving increasingly in the direction of providing total information solutions to its customers. In pursuit of its commercial objectives BT is conducting research into a raft of modern technologies including many aspects of machine intelligence. Work on agent technology has been a feature of our research at the world renowned BT Laboratories for the past five years.

This long term commitment to foundational research has resulted in the building of strong relationships with leading academic institutions in the UK and more recently in the US. These partnerships assist BT to maintain a world class understanding of the technologies that will be important in the coming information age.

FIPA and Agents Standardisation

We appreciate the need for standards to enable the commercial exploitation of intelligent agent systems in the areas of business, service and network management, remote buying/selling of information services, etc. Therefore given that the necessary commercial agreements and methods of working can be agreed among the prospective participants in FIPA, we wish to encourage the establishment of global open standards for the interworking of agent systems.

Goals for FIPA

We suggest the following goals for FIPA :

1. The generation of open global standards to permit the ready interchange of commands, messages and information between a community of agent-based systems.
2. Such agents will encompass "software" agents (concerned primarily with information processing / management) and "physical" agents whose actions impact the real world.
3. The definitions of methods of agents interaction, their internal representations (knowledge, data, inference, etc.) and their language and protocols shall not preclude those agents exploiting "network- based" intelligence.
4. In its deliberation leading to the preparation of standards, FIPA must take due recognition of existing and emerging, de jure and de facto standards such as OMG; ITU; ECMA; Telescript/ JAVA; KIF/KQML; etc.
5. FIPA must establish forward plans which embrace at least two principles:
   • There must be a balance between 'short-term' pragmatic standards and 'longer term' foundational standards.
   • The study programme must be based on both extending and revising current approaches and positively encouraging (through the member participants) longer term research.
6. The constitution of FIPA must encourage participation of a wide class of actors including telecommunications organisations, system vendors, national or international standards bodies and academic institutions.

BT Technical Interests

BT would encourage establishing technical definitions and specifications in the following areas, and subject to internal approval and securing appropriate IP considerations we are interested in participating in some of the mentioned areas.

(NB. numbers refer to Abe Mamdani's FIPA capability list) :

1. Communication languages between distributed intelligent agent systems, (nos. 6,8,9,10,11).
2. Cognitive architectures and knowledge representation formalisms to facilitate understanding between agents, (no. 12).
3. Agent toolkits incorporating an open design approach to the development, maintenance and distribution of agent systems, (nos. 13,14,15).
4. The interface between mechanical actuators (physical world) and the controlling software including language definitions, protocols, etc. , (nos. 1,2,3,4,5).
5. Security and safety considerations concerning single and multi-agent systems, (no. 16).

N. Azarmi, R. Nicol & R. Smith

Advanced Applications & Technology

BT Laboratories

Ipswich , U.K.